Charles Laughton (7 page)

Here were obviously many points of contact for Laughton. Another was art: Crispin is an aesthete. As he talks, he picks up a Rembrandt engraving: ‘This is one of the most beautiful things of its kind that man has ever made, and I – am I not one of the ugliest things that men have ever laughed at? But do you see my power over it? I have it in my hands. It is mine. It is mine. I can destroy it in one instant (
He tears it to shreds
.) You must forgive my – my lack of reticence. It is just my little theory, you understand – to be above these things. – What would happen to me if I surrendered to all that beauty?’

Laughton made all this that could so easily have been melodrama, real; so real, that there was a serious move by the London Public Morality Council to have the play stopped: ‘We are in possession of a volume of medical evidence that supports our view that the play should not be performed in public.’ Charles gave an interview saying that he couldn’t understand how it had passed the censor: ‘I can only conclude that he didn’t realise its nature.’ Nor, according to a piece he wrote in
The Weekend Review
a couple of years later, did the author. ‘My hero (or villain as you prefer) had been intended originally as a puppet twopence-coloured. I never dreamed that anyone could take him seriously. Laughton took him very seriously indeed, not for my
sake
or the play’s sake, but simply because he had the clay in his hands, and must add a pinch here, make a false eyebrow there, lengthen the nose, twist the mouth, knowing that as he did so, a created figure, waiting and long imprisoned, would be liberated and escape to the chimney pots like a ghost in Stravinsky’s ballet. Had the rehearsals continued another month, heaven knows what my Crispin would have grown to. Laughton works on his part as a novelist does on a novel or a painter on a picture, and he is at his best, as I believe Henry Irving was, when he has almost nothing to work on.’

This magnificent account of the actor as creator only stops short of asking where the contents with which he endows the ‘almost nothing’ come from. ‘“It certainly will be a relief not to have to turn myself into a kind of psychological compendium every night,” said the man with red hair to the
Daily Sketch
. “No one has the stamina to go on playing such a part for long.” Charles Laughton, who made such a terrible figure in the title role of the play at the Little, took off his red wig. “The part attracted me, but it has been a terrific strain. At first it used to upset me thoroughly and make me all jumpy and although I have become inured to that by now, the interpretation makes such heavy demands upon one’s physical and nervous energies that I feel I must have a rest.”’

The element that informed his Crispin in
A Man with Red Hair
was an element present in most of his performances: confessional. Laughton was always publicly owning up to something, usually something rather unpleasant. As he paraded his (to him) physically ugly body before the public, so he thrust his (to him) morally and emotionally ugly soul at them.

This may have had a purging effect for him. As important, however, was its acknowledgement of an inner self, summoning repressed and shapeless desires and instincts out of the shadows and onto the stage. ‘They may not be very nice, but they’re mine!’

The paradox is that by putting them on the stage, firstly, they become attractive, by the usual mechanism by which anything done with conviction on the stage becomes attractive, and secondly, they become less real.

Also, Laughton was a wonderfully gifted actor. There was nothing raw about his work. The unshapely physique proved to be capable of mercurial movements – always a bewitching sight, the swift fat man propelled across the stage by the slim legs and dainty, well-formed feet later revealed in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
– and complete
transformations;
the voice, impaired by poison gas and bedevilled by easily inflamed tonsils, was not reliable, not up to all that its owner demanded of it, but it was resonant, with a range from cellos to trombones (no trumpets, nor ever would be. Double basses and even Wagner tubas later joined the band); an ear that was good without being great (fortunately for him: perfect mimicry is a terrible curse for a creative actor: no great actor has ever possessed it); and an instinct for phrasing, for handling the span of a speech and directing its energy towards the crucial words.

Every review he received on the London stage singled him out for special mention, frequently describing him as the main and sometimes only reason for seeing the play. It’s hard to judge at this distance, but there is a possibility that Laughton’s performances were in the nature of solo efforts, devised during long and tortured hours of self-communion without the participation of his fellow-players, and delivered more to the audience than to them. It is possible that that is what the lonely, obsessed man did. The kind of relaxation that makes team-playing possible would have been hard for him to come by. There is a sense of this sometimes in the films. If so, it is a grave fault. Laurence Olivier’s advice ‘not to lose yourself in the other actors’ is wise, and courteous to the audience, but not to give anything to the other actors defeats them, you, the audience and the play. Few critics complained that Laughton had done that; there is, however, a single odd press report, in the
Express
, April 1928, which says: ‘The eulogy Charles Laughton has received has given great offence to the sacred ring into which talent finds it so hard to enter … most actors at rehearsals act for the producer, Mr Laughton waits.’

1928 was as full as its predecessor. Apart from the Walpole run, Charles appeared for two nights in
The Making of an Immortal
, in which he played Ben Jonson to Sybil Thorndike’s Elizabeth I (we that are young shall not see such sights) and then, briefly, he incarnated, as the Americans say, Hercule Poirot (another delectable thought). ‘Of course it is Mr Laughton’s incomparably fine performance of M Poirot that will draw London to the Prince of Wales Theatre.’ The play was
Alibi
(based on
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
), and it was produced by Gerald du Maurier, who may have made some contribution to what ‘CBH’ in
Theatre World
described as ‘a piece of acting perhaps more finely polished … (than his Crispin) … his portrait of M Poirot is still more finished.’

Hugh Walpole as it happens, describes his performance, in the
same
article in which he defines him as ‘not our finest actor, far from it … there are many who are, I think, in the general round at present finer actors. But he is our supreme creator’: ‘
Alibi
had a dreadfully bad first act, as clumsy and maladroit an affair as I can remember, but Laughton was terrific from his first entrance, not only in make-up – of which he is sometimes a master and sometimes not – but also in all the hints he gave you of his strange off-adventures. The plot that the detective had to unravel was less than nothing; he was never more thrilling than in the last act, when, his problem solved, with no beauty, no voice, no kind of charm, he made love to a pretty girl. The scene should have been revolting. You should have pitied the girl and agonised for her escape, but in truth you felt that she was fortunate to have a chance to live with so adventurous a spirit. She would find, you felt, everything bad and everything good in this man. She would have her shocks, she would have enchanting hours.’

Nothing is recorded of Laughton’s encounter with his idol, du Maurier: except one fascinating anecdote retailed by Emlyn Williams. At the outset of the production, du Maurier asked him: ‘Laughton, are you a bugger?’ To which Laughton stammeringly replied: ‘N – no, Sir Gerald. Are you?’

Du Maurier’s question was presumably a reference to the hysterical and malicious qualities Charles had brought to Walpole’s Crispin. But it must have given him a nasty turn. Because of course he was. He had not spoken of it to anyone, least of all to Elsa. If he had hoped that marriage would divert his desires, he was disappointed. His need for sex with men had not cleared up like acne, he was still impelled to find young men and sometimes even to bring them clandestinely home. Elsa Lanchester believes that these encounters were furtive and inspired by self-lacerating guilt: that Charles needed to sin, like a minor key version of that figure of whom he sometimes seems to be a thwarted alter ego: Oscar Wilde.

She may be right. There may also have been great pleasure; though certainly little happiness, in the long run. In either case, one thing is sure: he was leading a double-life. This can be tormenting, or exhilarating. To have a secret; to have a dark and unknown other self, cavorting and exulting in strange, dark and forbidden places – can give an excitement to one’s life. And work.

Lanchester is certainly right when she says that Laughton was essentially a moral man. He must have regarded this side of him as excremental; but he may have enjoyed the smell of his own shit.

Was it Charles’ sense of his own ugliness that led him to desire beautiful men? All this must be guesswork. Even when he was completely reconciled to his sexual inclinations, in the last few years of his life, and sought out the companionship of fellow homosexuals, he only spoke of such matters with the utmost
pudeur
, according to Christopher Isherwood. It is reasonable to assume that Laughton’s sexual appetite was strong, in view of his vast appetite for everything else: food, beauty, work. Had he so desired, he could have indulged it quite easily in the
demi-monde
of London’s homosexual society, with its access to the easily and quite cheaply purchasable bodies of members of His Majesty’s Services: it was a question of knowing the right bars (the Long Bar at the Trocadero, the ‘Troc’, for example) or the right private addresses. But even that required a certain boldness, a certain bravado, a touch of ‘Here I am!’ But now that was impossible for the plump young star, wishing his too, too solid flesh would melt. So perhaps he sought out the shadows. Perhaps that seemed more appropriate for the dirty thing he was about to do. Best perhaps to pick up some whorish lad, one of the many idly standing around the ’Dilly, and quickly discharge the pressure that had built up inside him, paying a few shillings at the end.

The idea of being looked at by a man with desire, not to mention love, was of course absurd, and probably wrong. That was his conviction.

He was nothing if not complicated. In life, as in acting, there could be no ‘just getting on with it’. He must arrive at everything by the most devious and the most painful route, feeling perhaps that what was easily won was not worth having. This temperamental inclination led to a wonderful complexity in his work, but also to great misery for himself and those who surrounded him, privately and professionally.

In his social life at this time, he might have been expected to be riding the crest of a wave. Fame in the West End Theatre between the wars was something very different to what it is today. West End actors were pop stars, mobbed at their stage doors; but they were also the toast of that now defunct institution, smart society. Success on Laughton’s level would be immediately rewarded by a sheaf of invitations to be propped up on the mantelpiece: cocktails with the Cunards, soirées with the Astors. Gossip columnists would be dispatched at regular intervals to discover his opinions on marriage, fashion, jazz; to winkle out his hobbies, his favourite reading and his taste in neckwear.

They found him a tough nut to crack. Lacking the later audacity of the Hollywood rags, they confined themselves to describing his appearance as eccentric, and that went for his conversation, too. ‘There is a touch of arrogance in Laughton’s manner; he gives the impression of a person who would not like to be contradicted or corrected … Laughton is himself one of the oddities of human nature: that pale puffy face, curious manner of walking, his shoulders hunched up, one a little higher than the other, that jerky step.’

They were too polite to mention it, but he was somewhat unusually dressed: not to put too fine a point on it, he was scruffy. And had perhaps not had a bath recently? Ever? His finger nails were certainly innocent of manicure, and probably soap, too.

Laughton was always careless of his appearance, to the end of his life. Lack of vanity? More likely a hatred of ‘dressing-up’, of formality of any kind – a childish pleasure in being ‘mooky’, in revolting against Eliza Laughton’s sartorial strait-jacket. There also seems, as with his fellow-Yorkshireman, W. H. Auden, equally unenthusiastic about personal hygiene or sartorial propriety, an element of aggression in it. Auden hated his own body, too, the way in which it failed to conform to the norms of desirability, and Laughton and he both seemed to be refusing to engage in the doomed task of improving their appearance – think I’m ugly, eh? Right. Well
look the other way
. The body might have been being punished as well, the betraying body, letting the whole side down.

A couple of years later, in Hollywood, Tallulah Bankhead would refuse to shake hands with him because of those dirty fingernails. But in London, in 1928, Laughton’s toilette was no obstacle. He could have more or less what he wanted. On this occasion what he wanted proved to be a major misjudgement, his first.

He’d seen an adaptation of
The Pickwick Papers
made for Basil Dean, and begged to be allowed to play Pickwick. Somewhat reluctantly Dean agreed, feeling that ‘there was always something vaguely sinister about Charles’ personality that he was never able to suppress, even in the most desirable characters.’ He was evidently right. Even
Theatre World
was moved to observe: ‘Laughton did not shine quite as expected’ – though ‘he looked the part completely’. Dean comments on how hard Laughton as usual worked: ‘He could be seen in and out of buses, tubes and restaurants poring over a large volume of
Pickwick Papers
’ (The
large
volume is a characteristic touch. Laughton liked to feel he was really working). But: ‘in spite of his devotion to the Immortal Memory it must be admitted that (he) failed as Pickwick. A
fruity
voice, a jocose manner and a wonderful make-up were no substitutes for the inner benevolence of the character.’