Charles Laughton (9 page)

Malcolm Muggeridge, lunching with him, asked how he got into the right state of mind to play Perelli. Laughton told him that ‘he used to remember how as a schoolboy he had believed that his fingers were going to drop off as a result of masturbating.’ The key. (Muggeridge adds: ‘this was my only, brief and not very pleasing encounter with the theatre and actors.’)

On the Spot
was, as Elsa Lanchester says, ‘a colossal success.’ It is interesting to note,
autres temps, autres moeurs
, that as a result of the colossality of the success, Laughton was visited in his dressing-room, not merely by fellow stars, not only by royalty, but by no less a personage than Mr Rudyard Kipling. It was the unmissable show of 1930.

It exhausted him, as well it may. The brief span of the play – it runs
no
longer than two hours – contains an amazing range of peaks to be scaled by Perelli, and he must drive the play every moment that he’s on stage. ‘Every night before the performance, Charles would have to lie on his back, remaining perfectly quiet and breathing deeply for over an hour. The doctor told Charles to spend as much time in the country as possible in order to keep his health.’

Stamina was a problem he never solved. He never mastered the art of conserving energy, of pacing himself through a role. In later life, because he was tired or ill, he learnt certain dodges, or sometimes just coasted, but at this time he simply gave his all, all the time. It’s a dangerous thing to do.

There are two ‘stories’ about the run of
On the Spot
: one showing Laughton’s theatrical
savoir-faire
; the other his lack of it.

During the out-of-town tour (no previews: an opening night was an opening night, by God) the sound system failed, and Laughton’s organ-playing at the beginning of the play was silent. He made a joke out of it; and at the curtain call, came to the foot of the stage and told the audience: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are the only people in England who know that I cannot play the organ. I hope you can keep a secret.’

Curtain speeches of one sort or another were still traditional after every performance. This one seems not to have fazed Laughton in the least.

The other incident, which occurred during the London run, completely unnerved him, however – as well it might: it’s an actor’s nightmare.

The actress, Gladys Frazin, playing Maria Poluski, Con O’Hara’s moll, was involved in a high-spirited off-stage relationship with the improbably named Anglo-Italian director, Monte Banks. One afternoon between matinee and evening performance, she returned to her nearby flat for a little refreshment. He, in a characteristic burst of impulsive rage, flung all her clothes out of the window. She, her better judgement perhaps slightly impaired by the beverages she’d been consuming, simply placed a mink coat over her nakedness, and returned to the theatre, just in time to make her Act One entrance, which she did. By now the alcohol had begun to impair her powers of speech, so she wisely said nothing.

Charles, glimpsing the flesh under the mink, knowing that the next line was ‘May I take your coat?’ and receiving no reply to his cues, started to sweat heavily. His improvisations were not especially successful. ‘I heard him turn from bullying gangster to terrified
Italian
waiter who had worked at the Pavilion Hotel, Scarborough.’ Suddenly Miss Frazin spoke: ‘Oh Charles,’ she said. The audience gasped. ‘I mean, Oh Tony.’ She giggled. The audience roared.

‘Somehow, seemingly hours, actually minutes, later, she left the stage. Suddenly she remembered something: “Julian, honey, I gotta get back to Charlie. I never said my
lines
to him.”’

This proved to be Miss Frazin’s last performance.

Charles had not handled the situation too brilliantly. Thinking on his feet was not his strong suit. ‘In repertory,’ observes Emlyn, ‘actors are conditioned to emergencies; Charles had never been in repertory.’ It is scarcely blameworthy not to have been able to handle the Frazin problem; merely interesting to note that, though he was by no means a ‘fourth wall’ actor, lost in the truth of his role, he was in fact now and at many points in the future, quite capable of stopping the show, stepping out of the play altogether, either to address the audience, or take a prompt; was in fact in quite conscious control of the play as a vehicle which he was driving, and never in any doubt that the play was – a play. What he lacked completely were gifts of spontaneous improvisation.

Whether this makes him more of an amateur or more of a
pro
is a tricky question.

Self-consciousness was still a problem. He took Emlyn Williams out between the shows one day. Emlyn was amazed that the man who brazenly stared him in the eye every performance, couldn’t quite bring himself to make eye-contact over the supper-table. His conversation was full of bluster and pretensions to intellectuality. It was simply an awkward encounter.

His encounters with Elsa’s friends had not been great successes, either. Neither in the Socialist aristocracy of H. G. Wells and his friends, where Charles sat silently absorbing what was said, biding his time till
he
became a great man to whom people would listen, (upon which occasions, Elsa unkindly observes, he often seemed to be rehashing what Wells had once said); nor with her Bohemian chums, whose hi-jinks he couldn’t emulate, and where he seemed ‘like an old gentleman, though he was barely thirty.’

There is a subtext here, it seems, which is patronising to the slow-moving, somewhat ponderous tradesman from Scarborough. It offers a sad glimpse of an outsider – almost everywhere, it would seem: intellectually, socially, even in rehearsal. Only on stage did he belong.

Not even, apparently, within the profession was he considered one
of
them. In an article entitled ‘Charlie
Not
Their Darling’, Agate wrote:

There are in the English theatre two subjects which are like a red rag to a bull. One is the prowess of Mr Laughton. Any praise of this actor infuriates all other actors. (The other red rag is any new production by Mr Cochran) … What other actors say about Mr Laughton is this: Yes, of course he’s good. But look at the parts he has had! To which my answer invariably is: Yes, let us look at the parts Laughton has had, and let us ask what other actor there is on the English stage who, given those parts, could have made so many and such different successes … I freely admit that three out of these fourteen performances by Mr Laughton were not good. But in none of these three failures and in none of the eleven successes has Mr Laughton in any Way resembled himself, nor has any one creation been remotely like another. This is a feat. It belongs to an art of acting which very few players in the country at the moment are practising.

The article did presumably not endear him any closer to his colleagues. He now crowned his sensation in
On the Spot
with a darker play yet.

Payment Deferred
, which opened at the St James’ Theatre in May 1931 is a major crux in Laughton’s life and work.

It was the end and culmination of an astonishing five years of creativity; the crowning glory of a brilliant succession of triumphs; a performance which cost him dear, and which was unlike anything his contemporaries had ever seen. It was the occasion of his departure for America.

And just before rehearsals for it started, the timebomb at the heart of his relationship with Elsa Lanchester went off. The explosion was contained, but the fall-out continued for the rest of their lives together.

It happened during rehearsals of
Payment Deferred
. Elsa was playing Charles’ fifteen-year-old daughter. The story concerns a man who murders a rich young relative and then tries to live with the guilty secret. He had been unusually hard to live with during the preparatory period, immersing himself in the character’s psychopathia and guilt.

Late one night, he came home in the company of Jeffrey Dell, the play’s adaptor, and a policeman. He told Elsa that he must speak to her privately. When they were alone he become overwrought, and
told
her that he had a homosexual streak in him which he occasionally indulged. A young man with whom he had had sex for money had harassed him for more. A policeman had intervened, and this was the outcome.

Elsa immediately reassured him that it was ‘all right’. Her politically radical background, her Bohemian circle of acquaintance (including not a few homosexuals) and her own instinctive permissiveness, all, theoretically, disposed her to treat the news lightly. She simply asked whether he had had sex with a man in their house. He had. Where? On the couch. Very well. Get rid of the couch.

Nothing more was said. Ever.

The case shortly appeared before a magistrate who was either very naïve, very worldly-wise – or gay. He dismissed the case, cautioning Laughton against ‘misguided generosity’. The case was reported, but Laughton’s name was not mentioned.

All this a week before the play opened.

Elsa’s immediate first response was to go deaf in both ears for a week. The shock was total. ‘I can think of no indication whatsoever that Charles liked young men prior to that time.’ The mad romp of their outrageous life together suddenly ceased – for a moment, but a fateful one. Her awkward,
joli laid
, madly-talented husband was
queer
. Well – so what! On with the party! But nothing, of course, was ever the same again.

‘If I had known all this before we were married it might have been very different, one way or another. But the deception is what hurt so deeply.’ Nothing was said. ‘It was only afterward, in later years that the boy episode proved to grow into a great wall – never mentioned, but distinctly
there
.’

So here they were with this kooky marriage in whose foundations a large crack had suddenly appeared, and they decided, without saying a word, to ignore the crack, carry on as if nothing had happened.

There were rehearsals to be got on with. Charles could have no difficulty in informing the character with what he had just gone through: and indeed, when the play opened, his performance was thought to have a force, a frightening realism, which amazed its audience. Elsa Lanchester consciously quotes from the review in the
Star
: ‘there was a moment when, thinking his wife had discovered his secret, he collapses into hysteria. The sight of the quivering, blubbering wretch aroused mingled feelings of disgust and pity.’

During the run of
Payment Deferred
, he began to endure acute anxieties in a form familiar to actors under stress: while he was on
stage
, he felt that his clothes were falling away from him, that he was standing in front of the audience stark naked. He was persuaded to consult the English high priest of psychoanalysis, Freud’s hagiographer, Dr Ernest Jones. After a couple of visits, however, he simply failed to show up. ‘Jones told me,’ he said, ‘that I know more about myself than he ever would, so there seems little point.’ Whether his anxieties were resolved is unrecorded (though Singer hilariously suggests that Laughton turned the tables on Jones, and analysed him, for which, according to Singer, Jones was very grateful). Perhaps Charles found that it was impossible to deal with the immediate problem, the hallucinations on stage, without dealing with the entire question of his sexuality. Perhaps, too, he sensed the sources of his work in the unresolved elements of his temperament, that he needed his guilts and secret exultations, that, in the famous Maoist phrase, like strong cheese they stink, but they taste great.

In a rare account of his approach, Laughton himself wrote (to a young actor who was going to play his part of William Marble on tour): ‘Poor rigid hidebound Mr Marble, the laugh is with him and on the audience. They crucified him, and by the end of the play they know they did it in secret fear of their own hidden loves under the mask of virtue.’ ‘
Hypocrite spectateur, mon semblable, mon frère
!’ is Laughton’s accusation to the audience. He dredges the lees of his own existence surrogately. The Christ-imagery is striking. ‘By the end of the play they naturally want to crucify me for telling them so.’

The Star
said of his performance: ‘The acting of Charles Laughton was astonishing. At times I found it almost unendurable to contemplate the agonies and fears of the murderer … here was an utter abandonment to funk and terror.’ The audience, as Laughton implied, were not keen on paying him to turn their eyes into their very souls, and Gilbert Miller, who had produced the play (which had, interestingly, been Agate’s idea in the first place, intended from the beginning as a vehicle for Laughton) decided to cut his losses after three months and try the play’s luck on Broadway.

What a relief this must have been! Elsa and Charles’ life – still living in their modest flat in Percy Street – continued apparently unruffled. They spent weekends in the cabin they had bought near Guildford, a place built as a private hideaway for himself by Clough Williams Ellis (the great and eccentric architect) and reluctantly sold to the Laughtons after much close questioning as to their suitability. There was no water, no electricity, little furniture. It was a real tree-house actually built on trees, and surrounded by untrammelled nature. To
get
to it, you had to walk half a mile across a field. It was an idyll, and Elsa and Charles were as happy here as they would ever be in their lives, picking flowers, playing games.

But it was an escape. It was not where the centre of their lives resided, and it ignored the violent explosion their relationship had undergone. Charles was rising as rapidly as an actor has ever done; he had probably risen as far as he could in England. There had been an awkwardness between himself and Edgar Wallace. He had not liked Wallace’s play
The Mouthpiece
, in which the leading part had been written expressly for him; now Wallace wanted to know whether he would commit himself to another play which he was planning. If not, he wouldn’t write it. Charles did not commit (wisely, no doubt: the author’s description of the part suggests that it might have defied even Laughton’s gifts for bringing conviction to the improbable: ‘the part I have in mind is a sort of Chinese D’Artagnan, except that he is entirely and utterly unscrupulous, but very game and philosophical to the last. He is steeped in Western philosophies, is a great quoter of the sages and is picturesquely executed in the last scene, after raping, off-stage, the wife of his benefactor’). Disappointed, Wallace ended their professional association. ‘I cannot enthuse myself to write plays on approval even for the most brilliant of artists … you have no rival and no competitor in your particular expression of art. If I write a part which you in your judgement regard as a bad play, or an unsuitable one for you, there is no alternative choice for the principal part, and one’s work would be wasted, and that would lead to all sorts of irritations and unhappiness, so, Charles, that is definitely the end of us as a combination.’