Charles Laughton (8 page)

It’s hard to imagine the schoolmasterish martinet Dean getting on very well with Laughton, but his blunt words seem to have the truth of it. Benevolence was not a quality Laughton could easily command at this time of his life. It came more easily later. It would have made him feel hopelessly vulnerable to have exposed his
goodness
. There was far more muck to be got out first before he dare stand up in public and lay claim to any virtue.

It is not difficult to see what drew him to his next play, a ludicrous farrago called
Beauty
. Now that word always sent a shiver through Laughton’s heart. The central character, whatever the absurdities of the plot, must have struck home very hard, too: Jacques Blaise ‘an ungainly and unprepossessing astronomer for whom fair ladies are as remote as the stars themselves’ becomes nonetheless convinced that a beautiful young woman has fallen in love with him, and tries to improve his appearance (by weightlifting and manicure!). In the end she falls, absurdly and unmotivatedly, into his arms. It was not a success; nor was he, specially (‘It was asking too much of Charles Laughton to transform this tedious affair into something credible or worthwhile’); but the review contains an interesting aside that suggests that the whole-heartedness of his commitment was almost a byword: ‘Blaise weeps once in every act and, Mr Laughton being one of our finest actors, very possibly during the intervals as well.’

Emotional intensity was still an uncommon quality on the English stage – not the rhetorical, high-flown emotionalism of certain classical actors, but direct self-exposure of Laughton’s kind. He was accused of self-indulgence and indiscipline, which charges Laughton expressly rebutted some years later in an article for
Film Weekly
. For the time being, there continued to be an unease in some quarters about certain aspects of his work.

1929 was not his best year for reviews: ‘Charles Laughton gives a remarkable impression – obviously it can be no more – of the handsome, athletic, Harry Heegan.’ Then, even more unkindly, in praising Ian Hunter’s performance of another role in the same play, the reviewer comments: ‘It is a pity
he
was not given the role of Heegan.’

The play was
The Silver Tassie
, O’Casey’s anti-war masterpiece, with its famous expressionist second act, designed by Augustus John. C.B. Cochran, the Diaghilev of English revue, had bravely decided to produce the play rejected by Yeats, and equally bravely cast in the
leading
part of the sportsman crippled in the trenches the young actor he had admired as Ficsur the pickpocket. O’Casey was delighted: ‘he is a genius’ he wrote of Charles to his friend, Gabriel Fallon. The director was Raymond Massey, and among the cast young Emlyn Williams, hot from Oxford, not missing a trick. His picture of Laughton at the time is brilliantly vivid, from the first readthrough on.

While everyone else stood around in the awkward or hysterical way of these occasions, Laughton was already in the wheelchair he would have to use in the last act, furiously trying to manipulate it. This drew unfavourable comment from the other young actors. It seemed ostentatious. It was. But it was probably the only way Laughton could handle himself. Small talk was not his forte; he felt neither one of the stars nor one of the company. And he knew he was physically miscast. ‘Footballer, my foot’, said one of the dozen or so walk-ons to Emlyn, ‘he looks more like the ball.’

His fellow actors never saw him offstage ‘except as a brooding baby in a wheelchair, obsessed by the difficulties of his part’ – although, very occasionally, ‘something would bubble out’ – something about the difficulty of the bloody Irish accent. He would laugh helplessly – then return abruptly to misery. It’s very understandable behaviour, but not, probably, very endearing.

Of the performance (the final act entrance) Emlyn has this striking thing to say: ‘The broken soldier whirled among the dancers like a maimed bull on wheels. With a dance tune, and an invalid chair and the mask of a great actor, the moment encompassed the tragedy of war.’ J.C. Trewin writes of him: ‘speaking each word in the last two acts as if they were stamped with a branding iron … this podgy young Yorkshireman had given promise of genius.’ Whatever else you could say about a Laughton performance, it was clearly never dull, and always the result of monumental labour to unlock the thing in himself that he needed. He always must find the key.

It must be stressed that his ‘keys’, which were to become more and more important to him, were not intellectual solutions – his understanding was perfectly able to solve the more or less simple psychological problems of the characters he played. The ‘key’ was the thing that would enable him to flood himself with the character’s emotional state. And until he had found that key, his work was without life for him.

Theatrically, Emlyn seemed to follow Laughton around for a while. After
The Silver Tassie
came a revival of Reginald Berkley’s farce,
French
Leave
, in which Laughton was promoted (‘you’ll be pleased to hear, my dear chap’) from Private to General – ‘an easy light-hearted success’ with Charles, more comfortable with a smaller cast and enjoying the mild satire of his part, transformed in rehearsal into ‘a happy enfant terrible’.

‘Frightful dissensions are rife about Mr Laughton’s assumption of General Root … Mr Laughton has been blamed not because his performance fails to evoke salvoes of laughter – his success in this respect is freely admitted – but because it does not keep the received truth concerning Brigadiers. The point about Mr Laughton’s performance is that it
is
a performance, meaning a piece of deliberate acting and not the normal, hand-in-glove, round-peg-in-round-hole miracle of coincidence. Felicities of this order have no more to do with acting than changing the labels on bottles has to do with wine’ wrote Agate in his notice – and then he was off into panegyric, which is nonetheless worth quoting because it contains sharp analysis of Laughton’s equipment: ‘The actor is young. His figure is podgy and devoid of any approach to military bearing. His features are dumpling: you might liken them to a broad champaign of flat, moon-struck rather than moonlit country. All this makes an admirable actor’s mask just because, like Coquelin’s mask, in repose it means nothing … mark, too, one feature which every great comedian has had – the long upper lip. But good character acting must be more … [it requires] intense apprehension of, and joy in, the character to be presented. Then again, good character-acting, like good art-work of any kind, must not only carry the artist’s signature, but must bear the impress of his mind. I understand that Mr Laughton, when he took up the present part, went to look again at the Orpen portraits in the Imperial War Museum, with the result that his Brigadier is a reproduction of all that Sir William Orpen made us see in the more serious medium.’

During the run, he took a few days off to have an operation on his throat which he’d resisted and feared. After it the residual huskiness in his voice which had dogged him in the last few years disappeared completely.

This was done in preparation for a part which would need plenty of voice – a part written for him:
On the Spot
, by Edgar Wallace. It was to be the greatest triumph of his stage career, a phenomenon, both as a performance and as a play; though the play depends entirely on the leading actor’s performance. It has never been revived with success.

The sensational aspect of the play was not simply its action; though
in
1930 its tally of seductions, suicides and brutal killings must have seemed lurid in the extreme. What gave the play its electric charge was the fact that events almost identical to the ones portrayed on stage were happening at that very moment on the other side of the Atlantic. To that extent, the play resembles the Jacobeans’ depiction of supposed Italian iniquities of their day: a sort of living newspaper: shock, horror.

The language has no poetic resonance, but it has an arresting actuality and urgency, hot from Wallace’s visit to Chicago. Wallace took all of ten days to write it: a record, for him – ten
minutes
was more usual.

The central character, Tony Perelli, is preposterous, until you think about Al Capone; then it seems quite naturalistic. Discovered at an organ fondling his Chinese mistress, Perelli swiftly moves through sexual assault, betrayal, murder, and pimping, to end sobbing in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. If the actor playing Perelli can make you believe in all of this, then the effect is breathtaking. If not, it’s ridiculous.

Wallace knew his man. He’d seen Laughton in
A Man with Red Hair
and the moment he’d finished dictating the play to his secretary, 36 hours after he’d stepped off the boat from America, he sent her, with the script, round to the Laughtons in Dean Street. Miss Reissar struggled up the stairs, past whores and small snivelling children to the top flat, whose door was opened by a sluttish figure saying, ‘Charles is out.’ This was Elsa Lanchester.

Wallace was not disappointed by Laughton’s reaction. He directed the play himself, and Miss Reissar was present throughout. She reports a most curious incident on the first readthrough. The whole cast was gathered on the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, with Wallace at the head of the table. No Laughton. Calls were made. Still no Laughton. Miss Reissar was despatched to the stage door. Had the stage doorkeeper seen Mr Laughton? Certainly not, he replied, the only person he’d seen was a tramp that he’d had to eject several times. Miss Reissar opened the door. There, smirking, was Laughton, none too formally attired. He accepted her invitation to come in, and the readthrough began. He read brilliantly; then left.

Miss Reissar did not report this story to anyone at the time, but, though it was unheard of behaviour for an actor of his time, it would not have surprised many people. His reputation was increasingly that of a man apart, an eccentric.

Rehearsals proceeded conventionally. Emlyn Williams (thanks to
Laughton)
was co-opted into the cast after two or three days of rehearsal. Charles had felt that his predecessor in the role was too much the conventional heavy. Such, now, was his prestige. At the age of 30, four years after leaving RADA, he now had casting approval for a major West End production.

Again, it is Emlyn’s account which gives us the most striking picture of the young star. It demands to be quoted at length.

Only one figure was discernible picked out under the working light, centre stage: Laughton.

As when he had swung about in his wheelchair, he was feeling his way to something, alone and absorbed. But this was different: he was pacing to and fro like a caged hobbledehoy, glaring and growling.

First, he experimented with a clumsy waddle, from which emerged a walking gait, lithe, graceful, tigerish; then the hobbledehoy stood stock still and scowled into the dark, blubber-lips pursed. He might just have been told that for the school play he had been turned down for the part of Cupid and was settling for a sulky Bacchus … as before the actors in the shadows studied him with the amusement of bystanders at a fair: weird way to work, rum cove, make a good story in the Green Room Club.

Edgar Wallace was certainly pursuing no avant-garde methods. Arriving late at rehearsals, he breezed in saying ‘Sorry Charlie, ’ad to go to see a bloke about a racehorse. ’Alf a mo’ while I catch up on the serious side of life’ – the
Evening Standard
racing page.

There was no end to Laughton’s avidity for perfection. Emlyn spoke some Italian, so was set to teaching Charles the phrases he needed for Perelli. ‘In corners, syllable by syllable, I coached an eager bumbling pupil who immediately bumbled ahead of teacher. To see Laughton catch fire, and set fire to me, was intoxicating.’

Years later, his friend and pupil Belita said: ‘Charles was a learner, he was always learning. If you were a learner too, you would get on with him. If not, it could be difficult.’

Although Wallace had written the part for Charles, it was scarcely typecasting (in the light of his previous 15 roles, what would that have been, anyway?), but it was totally within his range. He could command from within himself danger, violence, passion, authority, caprice, sarcastic wit. The only dimension hitherto unknown in his work was the blood in the veins of the role: naked sensuality. To release this, he devised a make-up which transformed him out of all recognition. The cameras of Pathé News recorded the process by
which
, before our very eyes, Charles Laughton gives way to Tony Perelli, a Jekyll-and-Hyde act as fascinating, in its way, as anything he ever put on film. He strides, vigorously and directly, into his dressing-room. He looks straight into the camera and tells us, in an impeccable cut-glass accent, what he’s going to do: wig, face-paint, boot-black to match his own hair up, finally – ‘a real secret, this’ – the false eyelashes, ‘a tip from Greta Garbo’. Bit by bit ‘this pudding’, as he calls his face, assumes contour, line, definition. As it does so, his accent becomes more and more Yorkshire, until, climactically, he assumes Perelli’s Sicilian-American tones. ‘Nize fella, very nize fella,’ he says, flashing a mean look at us, which, through all the crackle of the poor copy of the crudely made film, tells with some of the force that so bowled his audiences over. It contains real sexual aggression, and is both sexy and alarming, a million miles away from the suavely masterful campness with which he introduces the film.

Backstage, at the dress rehearsal, he appeared in swarthy make-up, with his long false eyelashes, in his Act One dressing-gown. ‘(He) gave us all a triumphant leer, and said in his Al Capone voice [
that
came from an Italian waiter he’d roomed with at Claridge’s]: ‘Who said-a I couldn’ be sexy?’ He was, in a new way. It made him happy as an infant.’ The photographs in
Play Pic
vividly chart the range of mood he established in
On the Spot
, menace and sweetness, violent rage, lust, cunning, all within a completely un-English timidity, an almost literally smellable oiliness. ‘In this present play of Edgar Wallace’s,’ wrote Hugh Walpole, ‘he is loathsome and lost. But he is much more than that. He is a poet and a creator of beauty. Every squirm, every husky whisper is a key to an important truth – and a truth we feel he is showing us for the first time. – Thus it is to be a real creator.’