Charles Laughton (17 page)

For someone to do what she did suggests a wifely devotion of the most touching variety. For her then to
tell
him, suggests the opposite.

In his article entitled ‘The Case of Mr Laughton’ (May 1933), Agate expressed concern: ‘I write this article because I have heard a whisper that he intends to devote the next twenty years to proving he is a tragedian. That indeed will be a tragedy, because it will be a waste of both time and genius. Mr Laughton needs no increase of intelligence, conceptual or representative, and his Macbeth will not be better if he thinks about it till he is ninety. It all comes back to the old question of an actor’s physical characteristics, which are beyond his or any actor’s power to control.’ Agate (and G. H. Lewes, whom he extensively quotes in the course of the article) believed that if you lack a noble bearing and a noble voice, you cannot play a noble character, and that, looking as he did, ‘Mr Laughton’s essential genius is concerned with the portrayal of the sinister, all the more horrific because of the fleshly suggestion … but Mr Laughton is also a magnificent actor on the mimetic plane alone, and is a master of that kind of character-acting which is as much a matter of mind as of make-up.’

There seems to be some confusion here: if he is magnificent on mimetic plane, then surely his physical appearance is not of central significance? But in his last phrase, Agate seems to hit the nail on the head: that character-acting is as much a matter of mind as of make-up. It is surely a factor of temperament rather than physical endowment which makes an actor able to encompass a role, and Laughton’s work must always be grounded in realism: he must believe in it within himself, or he could not produce it. In James Mason’s striking phrase, he was ‘a method actor without the bullshit.’ Guthrie wrote: ‘I think Charles Laughton did lack technique; when inspiration failed, as fail it often must, he had very little resource either of voice or movement.’

The truth is, he had almost infinite resource of voice and movement: it was his very versatility which had created the acclaim. What he could not do was to produce them at will. They only obeyed his imagination. This it was that limited the range of parts he could
perform
, and which would inevitably stop him from becoming a classical actor (or tragedian, as Agate prefers to say).

He had never had, and would never have, a success in a play which required him to adapt himself beyond his imagination. In the non-literary theatre in which he had up till now worked, he had brought far more to the characters than was in the characters. The authors were constantly (and on the whole delightedly) amazed by what he produced for them.

It was inevitable that he would, sooner or later, move towards the movies, because that is where the non-literary theatre took up residence. In movies, as in those vehicular pieces in which he made his name, the part was a kind of peg on which you hung what you thought might be interesting, or what you could do. In a ‘literary’ or ‘classical’ play, the role makes demands of you.

Laughton was miserable playing Macbeth. What he could bring to the role was not useful (certainly not in Guthrie’s production); what the role demanded of him he could not give: it wasn’t in him.

So he left the Vic. There was talk of him returning (to play the great prose roles: Dogberry, Pandarus, Falstaff and Belch) but it cannot have been too serious. The working conditions were impossibly frustrating for the perfectionist in him: he wanted to get things right. In the movies there was a chance of that. And in the movies – if one had the power and position that he had – once one had understood the essentials of the character, one could introduce new scenes to show certain aspects of him, cut other scenes to suppress sides which were not useful or interesting or about which one had nothing to say.

Laughton was not concerned to find a hypothesis that would explain all of a character; he was only concerned to embody certain features, to fill an outline with his own flesh and blood and experience. If he couldn’t fill the outline with that reality – simple! He’d change the outline.

Which he was not at liberty to do at the Old Vic. At the Old Vic he had for the first time reached that point where the creativity of the actor starts to interfere with the creativity of the writer. It had been a nasty shock, because, as a literate and artistically ambitious man of the theatre, Shakespeare was of course his idol. He withdrew hurt.

He didn’t spend the next twenty years trying to become a classical actor. In fact, he spent the next twenty years avoiding it. He made public statements averring his disillusion with Shakespeare – insisting on the irrelevance of Shakespeare. But it was his Great White Whale. He never stopped thinking about how to play Shakespeare. When, a
couple
of years later, he visited Alec Guinness’ dressing-room after a performance of the modern-dress
Hamlet
, he invited him back to his flat in Gordon Square for the sole purpose, it seemed, of reading, first of all some of
Hamlet
, then a great deal of
King Lear
. This last, says Guinness, was ‘an illumination’. He became obsessed by the iambic pentameter: perhaps he’d gone wrong there? So he spent hours – years – reading Shakespeare out loud to the ticking of a metronome. Then it was punctuation. Capital letters in the Quarto were no typographer’s error: they denoted operative words. He taught these dubious notions to his students.

When, old, fat and sick, he staggered into the ring again to lick the Bard, it was too late. But he never had a chance. His time at the Vic should have taught him that.

Hollywood Again

AMONGST OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
, the thought ‘who needs it?’ must have crossed his mind. Treated as an enemy within the walls by Lilian Baylis, and a fumbling upstart by the English press, he may well have wondered why he was languishing obscurely in the Lower Cut, SE1, only six months after being the first English actor to be honoured by a Hollywood at its fabled height of glamour. He was world famous, England’s celluloid ambassador.

Laughton was sufficiently complex, both intellectually and temperamentally, to transform these petty emotions into a philosophical position, but there is no doubt that he felt sniped at by cliques: by the establishment, theatrical and journalistic. At least Hollywood was free of these. It catered, moreover, to an infinitely larger and more genuinely important audience: the people. And it was of today, relevant to everyday life. Perhaps one could use this great new medium to spread ideas and stimulate deep emotions … it was characteristic of Laughton to rationalise emotional impulses: to justify his evolution. Whether the rationalisation preceded the impulse, or vice versa, is hard to determine. Certainly, his inclinations were populist; just as certainly, he had been deeply hurt by his London experience.

The result is that he returned to Hollywood with no heavy heart; determined, rather, to do something quite remarkable.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, on the face of things, was not obviously the film in which to do it. The play had been a great success in both London and New York, but the role of Barrett
père
(Cedric Hardwicke on stage) was neither the largest part, nor the most interesting, being essentially a heavy father, with melodramatic overtones. The most original feature of the character was the incestuous element in his relationship to his daughter – but that element had, of course, been filletted from the script in anticipation of Hays Office objections. The director, Sidney Franklin was, moreover, wholly opposed to the casting of Laughton.

Irving Thalberg, who was producing, serenely prevailed. He persuaded Laughton that it was a clever move to follow Henry with a smaller part, and Laughton immediately saw the possibilities for continuing his assault on Victorian repressiveness. As for the incest theme: ‘they can’t censor the glint in the eye,’ as he said at the time. His work on the role proceeded as usual: he found a model for the character to release his deeper, darker feelings. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he wrote in
Film Weekly
, ‘I based Mr Barrett on an acquaintance of mine whose sadism, prudery and long-drawn-out prayers I had often suffered in my youth.’ It’s never the simple observation with Laughton, though; it’s never impersonation. He embodies both what he saw and his attitude to it.
Pace
Laurence Olivier,
pace
Tyrone Guthrie, he doesn’t love his character, he hates him. As an actor, his state of mind is that of a prisoner playing his warder, the victim playing his attacker. This is one of the many reasons Bertolt Brecht and he found such common ground. Laughton is always present, pointing and shouting, crying ‘Look! This is what you’re up against!’ His unfolding of the character is designed to make the danger more real. ‘During the filming of the early sequences, the director complained that I was exercising far too much restraint and that Frederic March and Norma Shearer were nosing me out of the picture. ‘All right,’ I said ‘give me a chance!’ Presently, when they were beginning to think Mr Barrett wasn’t such a bad man after all, I let myself go and allowed the real, selfish, despicable Barrett to come to the fore.’

This use of contrast (‘a black white, black white effect,’ he calls it) is not to be confused with presenting ‘a rounded portrait’. It’s a technique of demonstration. The intention is neither sympathy nor balance but direct exposure to certain phenomena of the human character. It is designed to frighten and to appall and to distress: never to satisfy or to explain. It is meant to haunt and to brand itself on the brain.

Thus Barrett. Laughton shed 50 lbs to play the part, and sporting mutton-chop whiskers, dressed in the frock-coat of the 1830s, he presents a figure at once frightening and pitiful. There is something weird about his appearance, inhuman, bat-like. In fact, the performance has a not dissimilar quality to that of Max Schreck in Murnau’s Dracula film,
Nosferatu
, a self-consuming intensity that is heart-stopping, and a million miles away either from what Rudolf Besier (the original author) can have intended, or what Mr Barrett can have resembled in life. It is also in an entirely different mode to the work of Norma Shearer and Frederic March. March plays competently and pleasantly
en jeune premier
, though, according to Agate, ‘he is just a joke in so far as he must be supposed to resemble the poet … we feel the intricacies of “Mary had a little lamb” would be beyond him.’ Norma Shearer, equally unconvincing as the author of the
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, nevertheless holds her own in terms of sheer radiance and self-management. The scenes between her and Laughton are remarkable precisely for the tension created between his anguished repression and yearning and her placidity: an ocelot ogled by a succubus.

Sidney Franklin, the director (who later won an Academy Award for ‘consistent high achievement’, and was responsible for
The Good Earth
and
Mrs Miniver
, amongst others), simply avoided Laughton – understandably. His nervous enquiry as to how Laughton saw his role being answered with the snapped reply: ‘Like a monkey on a stick,’ he wisely withdrew from further discussion. In fact, Laughton was describing his view of the part with some precision.

Franklin was that admirable figure, a thorough-going pro. Such people were Laughton’s sworn foes, because he wanted to believe that he was an artist, and that he was engaged in an art. To be an artist was his aim and his justification. As the word ‘artist’, then and now, in London and in Hollywood, is regarded in the English-speaking world as hilariously pretentious for an actor to use of himself, Laughton took defensive refuge in the word ‘amateur’, pedantically insisting on its strict French meaning of ‘lover’. To him, he said, acting was lovemaking, so he proudly proclaimed himself an amateur. Pros, he told Garson Kanin, were whores.

It takes two to make love, and in this relationship, the director was required to be the more or less reluctant other. Sidney Franklin was not prepared for any such intimacy. So Laughton went solo. There is a term for lovemaking for one, which has a generally derogatory implication, and this term must often have been used of Laughton, no
doubt
on the set of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, perhaps on the day Laughton was unable to continue with the Bible-reading scene, because he suddenly found the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition of morality so funny. He laughed and laughed, terrible mad laughter, it is said, wave upon wave of it, till everyone else was caught up in it, and the film had to stop for the day while he got over it.

This was no straightforward corpsing, such as had occurred a few days before, when Norma Shearer and Maureen O’Sullivan had collapsed at the first sight of his mutton-chop whiskers. He hadn’t found that in the least bit funny, and had rather crossly left the set. No, what had happened to him in the Bible scene was that he’d been overrun by the anarchic and dangerous emotions he was dealing with – his own, particularly: his life – the whole mess of contradictory and sometimes paralysing impulses and repressions he was opening the lid on. He went a bit mad, in fact.

If acting is a creative art –
if
it is – then it is perfectly reasonable to demand for it conditions similar to those of the painter or the writer: the right, that is, to make a mess, to splash around, to make drafts and sketches, to have a wastepaper bin at your side. In any creative activity, art is madness, craft is sanity. The balance between them makes the work. But in movie-making, where rehearsal is rare, it is thought unprofessional for an actor not to have sorted out all his problems before the cameras roll.

The difficulty is, of course, the collaborative nature of the enterprise. The director of genius is the man who can provide the stability and the focus by which everyone can go fruitfully mad at once. Charles Laughton did not work with many directors of genius; Sidney Franklin was certainly not one of them, and his film would have melted into the great celluloid graveyard were it not for the performance of his moody and slightly mad star, which was universally acclaimed. ‘Mr Laughton is, of course, superb.’ (
New York Times
)