Charles Laughton (52 page)

But from the beginning of the forties, there had, too, been a
succession
of warmer and more reciprocal relationships, young men who thread shadowily through Lanchester’s and Higham’s pages under a variety of coy pseudonyms, like heroes of a Mills and Boon romance: David Higham and Bruce Ashe and Peter Jones. They were, according to Elsa, as handsome and as masculine and as teachable as could be. They came and they went, some of them staying on to become friends, others getting married and going away for good. There were the usual turmoils, rows, reconciliations, painful break-ups, trial separations, all the ordinary dramas, in other words, of human love, but with the complication that as far as Charles was concerned, it must all remain secret. He and Elsa had a little house in Palos Verdes, to which he would take his lovers. ‘As the years went by,’ wrote Lanchester, ‘I suppose I just came to accept these friends as part of my life with Charles. I worried about him, and I was always glad if and when Charles found a man he was really fond of and who liked him … Perhaps,’ she adds, ‘it was unkind of me not to show disapproval. My acceptance may have been more cruel, in a way, and made Charles feel even more guilty about it all. He was a moral man … it made me very sad that Charles should have to feel so guilty about it; that he seemed to need to be so secretive, all the while still wanting to be found out.’

It was Charles’ drama, his dark, tragic self, his secret. He loved to tell his secret, and was always amazed and hurt when the recipient of the revelation was unsurprised or unshocked. He would announce (as he did to Robert Mitchum, for example, or Terry Sanders, and even, as far back as 1938, to Larry Adler) that he had ‘a strong streak of homosexuality in his make-up’. That was the phrase. It seems that he wanted to claim a certain special status for himself, as if to say, ‘life isn’t easy for me, you know.’ It may have been the same with his now almost legendary sense of his own ugliness. Lanchester wonders whether his constant references to his physical unattractiveness (the most amusing was ‘I look like a departing pachyderm’) weren’t cries for help, whether he didn’t actually want to be contradicted. Well, yes, no doubt; but in a way his ugliness was useful to him, too. Don Bachardy expressed it acutely: ‘It was a conscious decision of Charles’ to be ugly. He found that he could handle himself better as an ugly man. He didn’t have to compete for certain things, he could demand certain allowances to be made … Charles constantly sought excuses, indulgence: ‘This is so
hard
for me.’ He wanted approval, encouragement.’ For someone genuinely ashamed of his own appearance, he made remarkable flaunt of it, tearing off his clothes –
all
his clothes –
at
the slightest opportunity, and plunging into his pool, there to float in the manner described by Peter Ustinov, ‘like a topsy-turvy iceberg’. People who are truly disgusted with their appearance tend to be crippled by it; for Laughton his ugliness was a way of engaging his whole being with another at the earliest possible opportunity. His ugliness, one might say, was a technique, rather than a condition.

And, in truth, few people found him ugly. Many women have gone on record (Belita, for example) as finding him positively attractive. His face was alive with expression and character. There is no denying that he was fat, and if that was an obstacle for you, you wouldn’t be attracted to Laughton. For a homosexual man, it can be a terrible disadvantage not to conform to the prototypes of desirability, but Laughton pre-dated the dubious dawn of gay consumerism. To be fat was not yet ‘the cardinal sin of the gay world,’ as a witty character in the film
Passing Glances
puts it. He was not undesired; and if there was something frantic about his lusts, that is the legacy of the early disappointments. Making up for missed opportunities is rarely an attractive spectacle, gay or straight, ugly or handsome, but it is one of the commoner manifestations of human unhappiness. What is important is that he never ceased to love, or to try to love; and in love he was tender and giving.

The truth about Laughton and his body is not that he thought he was ugly, but that he knew he wasn’t beautiful.
That
was the worm in the bud, the source of his life-long inconsolability. To be attractive was not enough: it must be Beauty. His aesthetic sense was hyper-developed; beauty in nature or in art hit him square in the solar plexus; and he failed his own standards. He was that tragic figure, a disappointed narcissist. He could never forgive the face that stared back at him from the mirror for not adding to the world’s store of beauty.

And so he tried to acquire beauty, to surround himself with it, to let it possess him. ‘Some people buy paintings, they say, because they have a love for them,’ wrote Lanchester, ‘but Charles really lived on them. It was not just love, it was a necessity. It was like drinking water or breathing.’ In hospital, his only outings were to art galleries: ‘Charles would have to be given a shot before the walk, and a nurse would give him a shot at the gallery to get him back.’ He must have his beauty. In the same spirit, he would surround himself with young men, feeding off their beauty, hoping that by exposure to it in sufficient quantities, he might catch it, suddenly find himself a member of that exclusive club, the beautiful of the earth. It is a
doomed
, forlorn hope, especially poignant, perhaps, for a homosexual, because there is direct comparison. In the last couple of years of his life, Laughton and Isherwood (with whom he had become close friends, wanting, as he told Elsa, to be ‘with my own kind’) were working on a play about Socrates, and had they completed it, and had Charles lived, it might have been his final Testament To Beauty. Charles could not speak the word Beauty without trembling; it is the idea around which his life revolved.

Happily, in the last few years of his life, great beauty entered his existence, in the form of a young man called Terry Jenkins, and the relationship came close to transcending the self-defeating tendency of so much of his emotional life. This was due to the extraordinary goodness and simplicity of nature of the young man, whose open and unquestioning acceptance of Charles began to make it possible for him to accept himself. Terry held up a mirror for Charles in which he saw a new face, one transfigured by love. They had met, propitiously, no doubt, for Laughton, in an art gallery, and the first sexual move was made by the younger man. When they repaired to Laughton’s hotel, he simply took all his clothes off. This gesture, Laughton told friends later, had overwhelmed him, the directness and frankness of it. It was a paradigm of the whole of the relationship. Terry Jenkins (a.k.a. the slightly swisher Bruce Ashe in Higham and Peter Jones in Lanchester) was one of that rare breed who is so comfortable within his own sexuality that the terms heterosexual, homosexual and even bi-sexual have no meaning; he was simply someone who communicated best and most easily through sexual means. Laughton made an instant impact on him and he sought to be as closely involved with him as possible. This absence of negotiations must have had a powerful effect on Laughton, a testimony that no amount of words or presents could have equalled. It must have done the thing that Laughton needed more than anything in life: it must have taken him out of himself.

And Terry was longing to learn from Charles. He had not, up to this point, been accustomed to function as a thinking being; Charles appointed himself his tutor, and opened up before his astonished eyes, a world whose existence he had not suspected. ‘I had never known such a person in my whole life; in fact, I didn’t know such people existed. His mind overpowered me. I found it almost impossible to grasp the mind within him. Being with Charles … was better than attending the best liberal university in the world.’ Elsa and others in Charles’ immediate circle were slightly impatient that he would spend so much time (and money!) on such an ordinary boy. His
ordinariness
was the whole point. Even his beauty was not exotic or conspicuous: he was perfectly formed, symmetrical, open – a lovely golden boy, his looks an exact counterpart of the straightforward geniality within. There was no subtext, no ulteriority to Terry; and with him, Charles relaxed some of the mass of defences and complexities that both protected and defeated him. Through Terry’s intellectual and emotional innocence, Charles regained some of his own. Elsa Lanchester marked his child-like quality. ‘He was possessed of the same wonder-struck quality Charles had.’ It was Terry and Charles who could say, like Lear to Cordelia, ‘We two alone will sing like two birds i’the cage’ – not, as she hoped, Elsa and Charles.

Once, only once, according to Terry Jenkins, there was a terrible explosion from Charles, and that was, significantly enough, when Charles decided to show Terry what it really meant to be an actor. Terry was by profession a photographic model, he had aspirations as an actor, and Charles and he had talked about acting as they sat round the pool. Then one day, unannounced, Charles suggested they work on a scene from
Witness for the Prosecution
– the scene in which Tyrone Power breaks down in the dock. They worked on the scene for five hours. ‘And I just threw the script down on the floor. I said no, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it. He said ‘Now you’ve got exactly the feeling you want! Now do, do it.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ And the more I screamed I don’t want to do it, the more he screamed at me, Do it! Do it! And of course I did it, and it was absolutely perfect … it was the only one time I’ve ever hated Charles, that day.’ He encouraged Terry in his acting career at all times, but only once did Charles try to let him know what a serious thing it was to be an actor. For the rest he preferred that they should sing like birds i’the cage.

‘And he and I went to Japan, and it was like two children exploring the world for the first time’. And then they went on a reading tour, which Charles accepted because he wanted to show Terry, who was from a little Bedfordshire village, the deep South of America. And then he was ill, very ill. But ‘such was his love for Terry, that he was able to get out of bed and feel well enough to go out on the road again.’ Early on the tour was Flint, Michigan, where he fell. Terry was there, and took him to the hospital, and he was with him at the St Moritz, and he was there when they went back to Los Angeles. He was there when Charles, who was haunted from the depth of his terrible conscience by the fear of divine retribution, demanded a test for rectal cancer (he had already anxiously enquired of Terry Sanders whether
he
thought homosexuals were prone to this complaint); he was there when the results were given to Charles and they were negative, and Charles, more drugged than clear in his mind, had pointed at Terry Jenkins, in front of the nurses and the doctors and said: ‘We have touched, but not in our house.’ Terry was there, day in and day out, and he flirted with the pretty young Greek nurse, which pleased Charles: ‘The fact that she liked Charles’ friend showed that his boyfriend was a man, a masculine man, which was very important to him.’ Elsa says she was glad that Charles felt strongly for someone, and she found herself buying food that she knew Terry would like. But the bitterness kept breaking in. ‘Maybe Charles had some ‘how do
you
do?’ thoughts for his boyfriends … he still liked to light their cigarettes, even if he was standing up, and they were sitting down.’ Still: ‘It’s surprising what you can get used to.’

Terry was not there when Charles died. Christopher Isherwood wrote to him in New York, where he was, that he should stay away, that Charles was in a coma, that things had become messy. He suggested that Terry should stay away from the funeral, too, which he did, and didn’t even see Charles’ tomb at Forest Lawn for some months. By then, he had married – the Greek nurse with whom he had flirted to Charles’ delight. Charles was the bond which somehow kept Terry and his nurse together for just over five years. Charles and Terry had been together for four.

The mess that Isherwood spoke of was nothing more or less than a battle for Charles’ soul, conducted over his drugged and etiolated body, with his brothers Tom and Frank ranged on one side, his wife Elsa on the other. The brothers were determined that Charles should return to the church; should die in a state of grace. Tom wrote to John Beary, as ‘one of the very few people to whom he has shown his inborn faith,’ that he was sure ‘that if ever there was a man who had lived his life “
Ad majorem dei gloriam
”’ it has been Charlie … he has had a strange life, always craving love. I think he is gradually achieving peace. I could only show him how much I cared about his spiritual welfare and when it came to it, I was unable to control my feelings … even if Charlie does not receive the consolations of the church as long as he is spiritually reconciled with God, which I know he will be, I shall be satisfied. But if he is received back it will be the greatest joy.’ His brother Frank was deputed to ensure that the slightest flicker of interest in God would be instantly gratified. There was a steady stream of priests (‘I wish they were more intelligent,’ moaned Charles) and it
is
remarkable that Laughton, in his fevered imaginative state, uttered no recorded remark about either heaven or hell. Elsa was fiercely opposed to him being tricked in his depleted condition into endorsing something he had vehemently denounced all his adult life. She claimed that he was more proud than anything else in his life of having, (just before going into battle) refused communion in the trenches. It is hard to exaggerate the courage and determination of a brain-washed Catholic who rejects his religion. Charles was, if anything, Elsa later admitted, suspiciously boastful of having done so: he made a religion of rejecting religion. The brothers, who well knew his position on the matter, argued that it might still give him consolation to return to the faith, and any consolation was to be seized on. Even the nurses joined in, convinced that the poor barely breathing wraith on the bed needed the ministrations of the church. One evening when Elsa was out, a priest was rushed in, extreme unction was given. ‘I think I’ve joined the gang,’ said Charles. He was also under the impression that he had signed away his estate to the Church, and a conference of lawyers and doctors was convened outside his door to establish the likelihood of this, while Charles, from inside the room called out, ‘Am I dying? What’s the matter? Am I dying?’ No signing had taken place; it was another hallucination.