My Life in Pieces (38 page)

The stage manager for a large portion of my time at the Bush was the charismatic Dutchman, Bart Cossee, the shy focus of many fantasies, no
whit discouraged by his habit of wearing black string vests through which his rippling musculature was sharply visible. He was of that breed of stage manager who, having had a maximum of two hours of sleep and half a sandwich, risk life and limb twenty times a day, wiring up live fittings, swinging from the rafters, heaving vast skips around, and then quietly and nonchalantly sipping a pint at two o’clock in the morning. Heroes, they are, and the Bush somehow found an inexhaustible supply of them.

After
Loving Reno
, I had two last stints at the Bush, both as a performer: the first was in another obscure one-man show,
Melancholy Jacques
, this time about the philosopher Rousseau, a sublimely cryptic meditation in which the audience were made to feel as if they were overhearing – barely – an almost in comprehensible private monologue on the subjects of art and love. Again, astonishingly, this seemed to work, and cast a considerable spell. One night the tent in which I was supposed to be spending the night, brewing my Nescaff, burst into flames; neither I nor the audience were at all animated by this, as I placidly doused the flames with Evian water, not interrupting my meditation for a minute. The second show was even more incendiary, though not quite so literally. It was
Kiss
of the Spider Woman
, which, again, I had brought to the Bush, and which it had taken Jenny and Simon and Nicky exactly half an hour to decide to do. A genuine masterpiece – oddly neglected – by the novelist Manuel Puig, it was given an exquisite production by Simon Stokes, with Robin Don’s masterly set, which converted the auditorium into the interior of an Argentine jail, the textures scrupulously and perfectly realistically painted by the great team of Gordon Stewart and Andrew Wood, now both dead.

Mark Rylance and I enacted the story of the improbable and tender romance that blossoms between Molina, the camp little queen, and Valentin, the determinedly heterosexual revolutionary hero, incarcerated in the same cell, and despite indifferent or non-existent notices (it was widely ignored by the broadsheets), it played to bursting houses, in an atmosphere of emotional intensity that I have never before, and alas, never since, encountered in any performance of which I was a part. The Bush is able to generate, given the right play, and the right production, a mood which is like none another, not even in comparable theatres; despite the least comfortable seats in London – perhaps the world – and an odd L-shaped configuration, and primitive air conditioning, and the roar of the Goldhawk Road’s traffic, and the occasional throb of a distant rock band,
there is a complicity between performers and audience which is both intimate and epic, which somehow fans the actors into blazing life, and which has informed an astonishing range and scale of work. There was talk at the time of transferring
Kiss of the Spider Woman
to another theatre, but much as I loved the piece, I was glad it never happened. The experience that Mark and I and the few hundred people who saw the show that sultry summer had was unique, and uniquely right, pure Bush. There’s nothing quite like it.

Life was joyously expanding in every direction, it seemed. In reality, 1984,
as I have written elsewhere, exceeded, for me, Orwell’s worst projections:
my adored friend Peggy Ramsay was found to have cancer of the breast,
at the age of seventy-five no picnic; she overcame it, but her struggle
against it seemed to me to have hastened the onset of Alzheimer’s disease
in her. And hard on the heels of that, my partner Aziz Yehia, a beautiful,
brilliantly gifted and personally enchanting man, exhausted by the depre
dations of his bipolar condition, did away with himself.

I was acting in a play at the time,
On the Spot
by Edgar Wallace. I found
great strength in the age-old imperatives of the profession to keep going at
all costs. The play was a dark and joyless one; thank God. I don’t think I
could have faked the inner blitheness demanded by comedy. I wrote a note
on the play for the programme.

O
n the Spot
is a play which bursts with naked power and sexual passion – a wholly credible evocation of the world of Prohibition Chicago, at its centre the Capone-inspired figure of Tony Perelli, ruthless and half-crazed with power and lust.

Who was the Englishman who wrote this? A very remarkable one indeed as it turned out. Of course I knew his name from a hundred book spines and from the opening titles of a series of British B-movies of the Fifties and Sixties in which his apparently dead body, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, revolved, swathed in smoke, in lurid black-and-white while an electric guitar pounded out chords of suspense and danger. I had no inkling then of the astonishing life and prodigious output of the man, his powers of invention or the popularity and widespread love which attended him, both as man and writer. He was a phenomenon:
poet, journalist, novelist, short-story writer (seven hundred of these alone), playwright, screenwriter, stage director, film director, racehorse owner, bon viveur, chronic bankrupt; what he crammed into his fifty-seven years almost defies belief. Most remarkable of all, a great deal of what he wrote is of very high quality, including a clutch of works which have passed into the cultural subconscious:
The Four Just Men
,
Sanders
of the River
, and the work on which he was engaged just before he died,
King Kong
. But the finest thing he ever did was
On the Spot
.

Its genesis is unusual. Invited across the Atlantic by his American publishers (he was as famous in the States as in England – during the trip he signed 1,250 autographs), the greatest crime-writer in the world was drawn irresistibly to the city of crime, Chicago. He made a special detour. Twenty-four hours was all he could spare, but he spent every minute of it being shown the notorious sites of gangsterdom: the garage of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, O’Bannion’s flower shop, the morgue. His guides were the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Chicago Police Department, and it was to them that he dedicated his play. He left the city laden with pictures and clippings of Capone, the homicidal grandee who now filled his imagination. The five-day journey back to England on the
Berengaria
found him brooding and silent. As soon as he docked he summoned his secretary, Jenia Reissar, and started, at midnight, to dictate. Within three days, the play was finished. Within weeks it was in production, with Charles Laughton as Tony Perelli. It was the biggest theatrical success of either man’s career.

The vividness and accuracy of the master-journalist, combined with the master-showman’s timing and manipulation of effect, have given the play an electric charge which is as powerful now as fifty years ago – but its authenticity is astonishing.
This happened
. Wallace’s play is a front-line report. Its truth and urgency is not dulled by the clichés of the genre, because he was inventing the genre. It was the first gangster play, and appeared before any of the contemporary gangster films were released. It presents an almost Jacobean vision: a world writhing with energy and desire but terminally corrupt. The judiciary, the police, the senate – all are corrupt. One cop struggles against an entire system – and when he finally gets his man, it’s by a bitter irony – a miscarriage of justice. The play’s vision is at once harsh and vital, horrible and exciting. Webster or Ford would have understood these people; Machiavelli would have recognised their world.

I knew of the play because of Charles Laughton’s involvement in the orig
inal
production, of
which a wonderful account is given in Emlyn
Williams’s autobiography. (Williams came to our first night at the Albery
Theatre, fifty-four years after appearing in that first production, just
round the corner at Wyndham’s. By now, he couldn’t remember a thing
about it.) I wanted to know more about Laughton’s theatre acting – more
about him. For the most part, though, I found precious little of value in the
extant books. Charles Higham’s biography was written under the aegis of
Elsa Lanchester, who was intent on revenging herself on her late husband;
Higham later told me hair-raising stories about how she had set private
detectives on to Laughton, and wanted the biographer to print the photo
graphs they had taken of him
in flagrante delicto.
The other biographies
were cobbled together from press cuttings and, worse, press releases. None
of them had anything to say about his acting, so I decided to fill the gap;
this was to be my second book, again for Nick Hern. I have no idea what
occasion provoked this piece, or when I wrote it; as far as I know it was
never printed. It is called
Looking for Laughton
and describes my first fal
tering foray into biography.

For the last two years I have been, more or less single-handedly, the Charles Laughton Industry: I have written a biography of him, recorded a documentary about him for radio and filmed one for television, and next Monday I deliver the
Guardian
lecture on him at the National Film Theatre. The curious thing is that all this has come not from obsession, still less identification, but from the clear realisation in the spring of 1984 that I was not him. I was doing a play that he had made famous in 1930,
On the Spot
, and I was unable to make it work, which caused me to ponder how he had managed it. Most of us draw our performances from what is written on the page: he had brought an altogether extra dimension to a character that is essentially a lurid stereotype. He had made people believe in him, to a frightening degree. He had taken the outline Edgar Wallace handed him and filled it with truth – in this case, a very ugly truth. This was an act of creation: of what order, I wanted to know.

He was, I should say, among the half-dozen most fascinating actors of the century, and a handful of his performances have a power and a scale that demand comparison with the work of painters and poets. It was clear that
his life in art was a kind of quest which took him into unusual areas for an actor.

I was an egregiously amateur explorer into those areas. I had an idea of the kind of book I wanted to write. It was Laughton’s acting I was concerned with; and it was acting itself I wanted to write about, with only as much about the actor’s life as would illuminate that. I had no truck with those biographies that concerned themselves only with their subjects’ careers or with the occupants of their beds. I
read
them, of course, and not without pleasure. My objection to them was simply that they contributed nothing to an understanding of acting as either craft or art. That was what had led me to want to write the book in the first place.

My first book,
Being an Actor
, was about the actor as Everyman, and attempted to delineate the common experience of actors by looking at the professional experience of one average young actor – me. In the Laughton book I set out to look at the work of a genius – to see what heights might be scaled with acting, what the conditions were for that sort of greatness. Laughton was, in my view, one of the very greatest actors who lived; even Laurence Olivier, who hated him, described him as a genius.

When I was trying to play Tony Perelli in
On the Spot
, I turned to the only available biography, and to Laughton’s wife’s autobiography, and there was virtually nothing in either about the performance as such, or about how he’d achieved it – let alone what he was trying to achieve in general. The best book I know about any actor as an artist is Parker Tyler’s
Chap
lin: Last of the Clowns
, and I modelled myself on him, hoping to emulate something of the searching analysis and openness to resonance of his work. I would like to have written in his deliciously fancy-pants prose, too, but I wisely refrained from even trying. Another influence was Robin Lane Fox’s
Alexander the Great
, which eschews any attempt at novelish continuity or authorial omniscience and instead stops the flow again and again to say: what does such and such bare fact mean? What is its context? In doing so, it opens doors on history which no seamless narrative could hope for. Those were my models – but actually doing the work was something else.

I knew nothing about research, where to go, how to look, how to take notes. I had help: the publisher provided me with a hundred man-hours of it. The man whose hours I was given was a very agreeable and thorough Canadian who, at my behest, found the cast list and credits of every
picture and play Laughton had been involved with, marked those who were still living in one colour ink, those who had written books in another. Then he located as many reviews as he could find; and then it was over to me. I read every word anybody had ever written about Laughton; I read every play he’d ever performed, and every original source from which any of his films had been drawn. Then I went to America; Laughton had lived half of his adult life there. I had a clutch of introductions and – which I was sure would impress any potential interviewees – the imprimatur of the BBC, who had asked me to make a radio documentary for them. I went out and bought the most expensive Sony recorder I could find, and sometimes it worked, though not too well, alas, when I spoke to Billy Wilder. I was so awed at eating bagels with the director of
Sunset Boulevard
and
Some Like it Hot
that I never asked him to stop swivelling round in his chair like that and could he possibly close the window? But he had astonishing things to say, and made me laugh again and again. What was wonderful about our conversation was his unreserved enthusiasm for Laughton, and his certainty that not only was he a great actor but a great intellect, too: ‘He was a renaissance man,’ Wilder said, and it rejoiced my heart.