Charles Laughton (2 page)

Those were my models. Actually doing the work was something else. I had written
Being an Actor
at high speed, having brooded on the material for several years, and I cracked on with
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
with similarly determined energy, while pursuing my various day jobs, acting and directing. I scarcely knew where to start; writing about oneself is easy, of course, requiring very little research. This was different. I knew nothing about where to go, what to look for, how to take notes. Admittedly, I had help: the publisher provided me with a hundred man-hours of research. The agreeable and very thorough Canadian who did the work found the cast list and credits of every picture and play Laughton had ever been involved in, marked those people 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; after that it was over to me. In fact, I quickly discovered that though my researcher’s work was impeccable, I had to do it all over again, because it is what you see in the adjacent column to the one you’re supposed to be looking at that offers the real illumination. So, under my own steam now, I read every word anybody had ever written about Laughton; I read every play he’d ever performed; I saw, as often as not on a Steenbeck editing console at the BFI, every film he’d ever made. I even tracked down every original source from which any of the films had been drawn.

I sought out and spoke to anyone I could locate in the British Isles who had known him. 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 state-of-the art recorder I could find, and sometimes it actually worked, though not too well, alas, when I spoke to Billy Wilder. I was so awed to find myself eating bagels with the director of
Sunset Boulevard
and
Some Like it Hot
that I never plucked up the courage to ask him to stop swivelling round in his chair like that and could he possibly close the window? But he had astonishing things to say, peppered with vintage wisecracks; his unreserved enthusiasm for Laughton was thrilling to hear, as was his certainty that not only was he a great actor but a great intellect, too: ‘He was a Renaissance man,’ Wilder told me, which was exactly what I wanted to hear.

I interviewed over fifty people on both sides of the Atlantic, and learned to develop photographic hearing for the times (one out of two) when the tape recorder failed me. If it wasn’t batteries, it was the mike; if it wasn’t the mike, it was the tape; and if it was neither of those, I’d just forget to switch the thing on. On one occasion everything was perfect, bar one tiny detail: I’d left the microphone at home. I pretended that there was a built-in microphone, and switched on regardless, even checking the batteries at periodic intervals. I spoke to a huge range of people, some famous, some not. I spoke to Stewart Granger (‘To know Charles was NOT to love him’); to Belita, the ice-skater whom Laughton had taken under his wing when she tried to become an actress, and who said he was ‘the sexiest man alive’; to Benita Armstrong, who had seen me on a television programme talking about writing the book, and who invited me to tea to talk about her late husband John who had designed Laughton’s season at the Old Vic and his flat in Bloomsbury. I had a chimerical telephonic relationship with an infinitely gracious and amusing Deanna Durbin, in retirement in Neauphle-le-Château, who, over three long conversations touching
on
many subjects, absolutely and totally refused to say a word about Laughton. I discovered the value of recommendations: it was Vincent Price (‘eating with Charles was a carnal experience’) who had put me onto Deanna Durbin, and Clare Bloom gave me Christopher Isherwood’s number, but he didn’t want to talk to me about Laughton either. He died not long afterwards, and I realise now that he had no desire to talk about someone who had died of the same disease that was at that moment killing him. A year later I phoned Isherwood’s partner, Don Bachardy, to see whether he might have something to tell me. He too declined, saying that ‘Charles was an enthusiasm of Chris’s that I didn’t share’. Instead, he said, would I care to let him draw my portrait? When he’d finished, he showed me the drawing: it was an extraordinary thing, half me and half Laughton. Showing it to me somehow released him to talk about Laughton: and what he said provided me with some of the most acute insights into the man and his acting of anyone I spoke to.

I managed to unearth the last few survivors of Laughton’s family. Two female cousins with whom he had been brought up in Scarborough now lived together in London. I had been warned in advance that one was manic-depressive and that the other had recently had an unreliable set of dentures installed. On cue, the younger of the two started out vivaciously but quickly slithered into gloom and finally deep silence, while the other talked wittily and sharply about Laughton as a boy, but to a castanet
obligato
from the new gnashers. The sisters put me onto his brother Tom’s widow, who thrilled me by telling me that she had a tape of a family gathering at one of Charles’s visits back home on which occasion not only Charles but both his brothers and his mother spoke. When we sat down to listen to it, nothing but a soft hiss came out of the speakers. She had played it that morning, she wailed, and it had been fine; she had presumably pressed the record button while playing it back. Meanwhile, her new husband, a Scottish doctor, helpfully informed me that Laughton was sexually insatiable: ‘He was homosexual, you see, and your homosexual is invariably promiscuous: it’s in his nature.’

Eventually, I had gathered sufficient material to begin writing, at which point Nick Gray from Yorkshire TV called and suggested that it might be interesting to do a TV documentary as well. This was a tremendous bonus because it meant that I could reach certain people that neither a book nor a radio documentary would entice; Robert Mitchum was one of them. In the event, he chose to answer me only in monosyllables, an experience like trying to make small talk with Mount Rushmore. I guessed that a big organisation could provide better facilities for research, particularly in the celluloid sphere, and so it proved. Helen McGee, a celluloid sleuth of genius, tracked down extraordinary things, like a 1930 Movietone News sequence of Laughton making up in his dressing room at Wyndham’s as the Al Capone-like gangster Tony Perelli in his great stage hit
On the Spot
.

We filmed the documentary as I was writing the book, so new discoveries could be fed from one into the other. I wrote quickly, in Scarborough, where Laughton grew up, in a hotel once owned by his brother, Tom, and having triumphantly delivered the manuscript ahead of time, I went to Los Angeles on a jaunt, taking the proofs with me. One night I found myself at some do or another, dining next to a nice chatty fellow. When I told him about the book he said, ‘Find anything interesting in the Archive at UCLA?’ I looked at him aghast, my mouth working but no words coming out. Finally I croaked, with an insouciant little laugh: ‘Archive?’ ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the Laughton archive.’ I laughed my pearly laugh again and beat a rapid retreat. The next day, I got a cab to UCLA’s leafy campus, ran into the library, and breathlessly requested the Laughton archive. As I sat in the clinical room waiting for it, cold sweat formed on my brow. The door opened and three trolleys were wheeled in containing the twenty-six boxes of the archive. A feverish and rather brutal search revealed to my almost tearful relief that twenty-five of the boxes contained screenplays that Laughton had rejected. The twenty-sixth box contained pure gold – letters from Brecht, Orson Welles, sketches for pieces he was writing, an annotated script for his stage
production
of
John Brown’s Body
. I made my notes, asked for my photocopies, and ran for dear life. I had warned my publisher, Nick Hern, then at Methuen, to hold the press; I was able to rewrite sufficiently quickly to accommodate what I had just discovered. Saved by the bell.

The book was, for the most part, very well received. Even then, in 1987, Laughton – once a byword for great acting, universally imitated, and almost universally admired – was beginning to fade in fame, and much of what I had written came as something of a revelation to my readers; the simultaneously-released television documentary was able to show in the flesh what I had attempted to describe on the page.

Shortly after the book appeared, I began to receive the letters every biographer half dreads and half longs for, pointing out, gently or not, solecisms of one sort or another, most of which I was able to correct in subsequent editions. One of the most remarkable of my correspondents was a then very young woman from Barcelona, Gloria Porta Abad, who evinced an unlikely passion for Laughton, and an even unlikelier persistent scholarship in matters Laughtonian which rather put my whirlwind efforts to shame. She has spent the last twenty-five years slowly unearthing deeply fascinating information about Laughton’s schooldays and his time in the trenches during the First World War, which she has written up in a fine series of articles in impeccable English; she’s even created a website with the splendidly feisty name of rootingforlaughton. Her work, and that of other isolated researchers has greatly deepened our knowledge of Laughton, and should be the basis of a new biography. But there is no sign of that on the horizon, and none of it materially alters our understanding of his acting; the new research has augmented and supplemented my findings, not, I’m relieved to say, invalidated them.

Except in one area.

I said at the beginning of this introduction that Laughton had faded from public consciousness, ‘as an actor, at any rate’. But that was not the end of Laughton. The most unexpected, the most
improbable
, thing has occurred: he has become more famous for the one film he directed than for all the once legendary performances he gave as an actor. The irony is all the richer since the failure of the film, both critically and commercially, broke his heart. The outcome of this wholly unexpected development has been a great growth of scholarship concerning
The Night of the Hunter
. When I was writing my book, I had access to the manuscript (now successfully published) of Preston Neal Jones’s outstanding work of oral history,
Heaven and Hell to play With
, which records the memories of as many participants in the film as were alive at the time of writing. I had personally spoken to the Sanders Brothers, who had been Laughton’s Second Unit directors on the film, and, however monosyllabically, to the film’s superb star, Robert Mitchum. I had of course read all the memoirs of those involved, and other interviews conducted with members of the team. Most of my information on the film – how it came about and how filming had proceeded – came from various interviews, not conducted by myself, with the film’s producer, Paul Gregory. And Gregory, a colourful character, told a vivid story, especially about James Agee’s contribution to the film. Whatever his previous triumphs, both as screenwriter (
The African Queen
) and as elegiast of the South (
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
), Agee, Gregory reported – and is duly quoted by me as saying – was a hopeless drunk, who produced a grotesquely overlong screenplay that Laughton never so much as looked at, instead himself writing a version more or less overnight, which they then proceeded to shoot; Gregory added that Agee had been booted off the set by Laughton. His wholly undeserved credit nonetheless stood, because, Gregory said, they didn’t like to kick a man when he was down. In my biography, I added to this sustained vilification of Agee by crying fraud over the fact that Laughton’s screenplay was later, posthumously, ‘good enough,’ as I said, ‘to have been passed off for years (in
Five Film Scripts
by James Agee) as the work of a seasoned genius.’ The original screenplay had long ago disappeared.

Some years after
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
came out, I
was
asked by the BFI to write a monograph on
The Night of the Hunter
, and in preparation, I took stock of the latest research, by Jones and others. Various perfectly lucid memos from Agee had come to light which suggested that whatever he might have done in his spare time, he was far from drunk on the job, that Laughton seemed to respect him at all times, that he himself sought to share his credit with Laughton for the latter’s contribution to the screenplay, that he remained on the payroll for the full five weeks during which he undertook re-writes, and that he took a keen interest in the editing of the film. I assimilated all this material into a revised view of Agee’s contribution, but in the absence of the original screenplay, I concluded that nonetheless Laughton was substantially responsible for the script as filmed. The book duly came out to appreciative murmurings in the world of Film Studies. Then, a couple of months after publication, I received two letters within a very short space of time. One was from Paul Gregory, who, to my embarrassment, I had thought had gone to the great cutting room in the sky. When I had been doing the research for
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
, I was told that after the death of his wife, Janet Gaynor, he had withdrawn to Palm Springs to raise squabs, and was incommunicado. His letter thanked me for the book, for its balance and accuracy, and hoped that we might meet one day.

The other was from the James Agee estate asking me whether I’d like to read the original screenplay. A couple of months later, I was in Los Angeles, and visited Gregory, but not before I had received and read Agee’s screenplay. I discovered that despite a great deal of elaboration of incidents and characters in the novel characteristic of most first drafts, the original screenplay, with its six-section structure, was quite clearly the basis of the film as it was shot, with certain curtailments and excisions, certain condensations and extrapolations, of a kind that every director makes, either during pre-production on the set, during filming, or afterwards during the editing process. Clearly Laughton was the governing spirit in the making of the film, but the nuts and bolts
of
the writing of the screenplay were put in place by James Agee. All of this is brilliantly described in Jeff Couchman’s book
Credit Where Credits are Due
, which any
The Night of the Hunter
enthusiast should eagerly seek out. In my long and very frisky meeting with Gregory at Palm Springs, I gently suggested that all this new evidence pointed to a very different story to the one he had told; he brushed the idea aside. Short of bringing him the original screenplay and taking him through it page by page, it is hard to know what would have convinced him to change his story. Why it was so important to him to demonise Agee and exalt Laughton, with whom his relationship, always difficult, eventually foundered beyond the point of no return, is a matter for conjecture. It is equally baffling to know why he – and Robert Mitchum – always insisted that Laughton loathed the child actors in the film (particularly Billy Chapin, who so brilliantly plays John in the film) and preferred not to work with them, leaving it to Mitchum to direct them. Grave doubt was cast on this version of events by another remarkable development in
The Night of the Hunter
studies, Robert Gitt’s discovery and restoration of the rushes of the film, including many sequences where the camera had been left running after Laughton had called ‘Cut’ and gone to work with the actors before the next take. Laughton is shown as charming, affectionate, and playful with the children, now and then becoming quite strict with them – just as he is, in fact, with all the actors. A selection of these fascinating and moving examples of his directorial approach can be seen on the newly-issued Criterion edition of
The Night of the Hunter
.