Charles Laughton (39 page)

For him, ‘story-telling’ (the term was a comprehensive one for him, embracing poems and psalms and plays alike) had always been the most direct means of communication. He had read to all and sundry over the years; he had been especially moved by the response of wounded GIs to whom he read regularly during the war. He was shy and self-conscious initially, uncertain of how they would react.

I read sentimental and innocuous things which I thought would please them. I read three times a week, but one day I tried something heavy and tragic, and there was an immediate response. They started to talk about their own problems – being in bombers over Germany, or in foxholes, or how they felt after they had been maimed. And so I found that serious literature was a great help to them because other people in centuries gone and in the present had had all the experiences there are to be had, and the GIs felt they were not alone.

When he extended his reading to large halls in front of a thousand people, or more, the sense of communication and the cancellation of loneliness, was just as powerful. ‘We all do the same thing together – laugh or wonder or pity – and we all feel good and safe because the people around us are the same as we are.’ This was something quite different from acting in plays, where the actors and the audience must perforce be separate. Here he was sharing something that meant a great deal to him. ‘When I was reading from all the books I loved, I found the business of reading aloud was a matter of making the effort to communicate something you love to people you love.’ During the war, the GIs had protested when he started to read to them from the Bible. ‘They did not want to hear anything from a dull book. The Bible was not dull to me, but I had to prove to them that it was not dull. I used every trick that I had learned and they liked it and they asked for more.’ How to tell the story in the clearest, funniest, most vivid way was the simple task that Laughton took to with such relish. It returned him to a sense, so vital for his self-respect, of the importance and dignity of his job. In a moving phrase, he writes: ‘I found that people had – contrary to what I had been told in the
entertainment
industry – a common shy hunger for knowledge.’ He took the task of trying to satisfy that hunger very seriously indeed.

To describe Laughton’s performance as ‘reading’ is not, strictly speaking, accurate. For one thing, he had actually memorised all the material and used the book as a mere prop – as he freely admits during the course of the performance. But the readings anyway comprise only about half of the show; the rest is linking material – one-liners, anecdotes, introductions. The experience of listening to the records he made of the show is very pleasing, like spending time with, not a professor, but a lover of art and life. It’s cunningly constructed for variety of tone and for fruitful juxtapositions. And behind everything is a sense of points being made; nothing is there without a reason. In the gentlest, least patronising way, it is a kind of lecture, or, rather, perhaps, an introduction to culture. Because it is done with such love and modesty, it communicates directly. Although Laughton flatters the audience to some extent, there is never any question but that there is someone real there, not a mere front-man. He obviously knows what he’s talking about, and it obviously matters to him. It is above all generous.

It started with him shambling onto the platform in an overcoat from which, balefully eyeing the audience, he would remove books, one by one, making a pile out of them. Then the overcoat would come off to reveal him attired much as he would be in the street, i.e., shabbily. He’d chuckle: ‘Here we are again – an actor and an audience …’, and he’d be off, with the first reading, after which, ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he’d suddenly say, and it might be a four-line gag about a little boy he spoke to in Athens, Ohio, or it might be an anecdote about Henry Moore. He was at great pains throughout to humanise contemporary artists, to explain why they paint or sculpt the way they do. His range of readings, too, goes from the Bible to Shakespeare to Shaw to Jack Kerouac. ‘The spirit goes on,’ he says, after a reading from
The Dharma Bums
. The readings themselves vary in quality; he is prone, when faced with a lyrical or emotional text, to use what Brecht described as ‘the well-known international clerical tone’. With a dramatic text, like the Burning Fiery Furnace story, the characterisation of each separate character, and the evocation of action, amounts to great virtuosity. He reads the whole of the oration scene from
Julius Caesar
, playing all the characters, not least the crowd, and makes a very vivid job of it. Now that authors no longer read their plays to the cast on the first day of rehearsals, it’s a novel experience to hear a play read by one person – stage directions and all. It proves to be strangely
satisfying
– you ‘get’ it very strongly. This was an art form that Charles had perfected over the years. He reads a passage from Plato’s
Phaedrus
dialogue, loosely and speakably translated by Christopher Isherwood. It is a section about the lover and the beloved that might be thought to be very close to Laughton’s heart; interestingly, though, he chooses neither to characterise Socrates, nor to connect very strongly with it emotionally: he is concerned to pick his way carefully through the difficult material, striving for clarity rather than expression; and he succeeds. It’s completely lucid. The most remarkable – and laudable – thing about it is that he chose to include it at all.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the heart of the show lies in his less formal linking comments and stories. One of them, about Chartres Cathedral, and his encounter with the curator, Étienne Houvet, is a little masterpiece, like something by de Maupassant: he went to Chartres when he was nineteen, and had the good fortune to be shown all of its wonders by the curator, a very old man. Twenty-five years later, he returned, and as he gazed round the building, a voice came out of the dark: ‘Where have you been for 25 years?’ But the exceptional feature of the story is his description of the cathedral: ‘There are blues and greens in that window like you’ve never
seen!
’ he cries. ‘This building was built by the trade unions of the day, ordinary men and women, craftsmen, traders.’ He uses his voice at its most thrilling in such passages, the rallentandos on crucial phrases, the shouts of joy as he describes something particularly beautiful. It’s easy to believe that he may have been a very good teacher, not from his analysis, or from intellectual stimulation, but from his ability to open one’s eyes to beauty, to the wonder of things. He renders aesthetic emotion highly attractive, and so he works his ends by example. The public got an absolutely true encounter with the impassioned aesthete that was Charles Laughton, with only the dark and the pain edited out.

‘You looked so beautiful tonight,’ said Paul Gregory to Charles after he’d given the show one evening. Laughton wept. ‘You bastard, you bastard,’ he kept saying, ‘what did you tell me for?’

It exhausted him, but it exhilarated him. ‘I believe this is something people want,’ he told Elsa after the first tour. ‘You look very tired and fifteen years younger,’ she told him. He continued doing the show to the end of his life, visited every part of the country of which, since April 1950, he and Elsa had been citizens, became a national figure, made a great deal of money (soon he was earning $4,000 an engagement)
and
above all was a triumphant ambassador for beauty. It was all missionary work, a kind of one-man peripatetic university. ‘Charles believed that in America people never stopped wanting to learn,’ wrote Lanchester. ‘That was one of the things that attracted Charles to America in the first place: the eternal student point of view.’

The energy which had for nearly a decade only fitfully found a channel was now fully engaged. He no longer looked to movies for artistic activity; now – by an exquisite irony – he looked to them to publicise his reading tours. It was in this spirit that he made
The Strange Door
, a half-hearted, half-baked adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, ‘The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.’ Joseph Pevney directed it, Irving Glassberg wrote it and there is nothing that can be said in its favour. Boris Karloff, an old colleague, though never a friend, gives a grey, dull performance, whereas Laughton himself does exactly what he was so often (and so often unfairly) accused of: he messes sloppily around, pulling faces, slobbering, leering, chuckling, wheezing, a nightmarish display of an acting machine out of control. Even the obligatory eating scene is perfunctory, as he crams the grub mechanically down his gullet. He plays a wicked nobleman who’s imprisoned his own brother for twenty years. The character (insofar as there is any character at all) emerges as a blend of Squire Trelawny from
Jamaica Inn
and Captain Kidd with none of Trelawny’s incipient dementia or Kidd’s rough amorality. Evidently it satisfied Laughton’s purposes, however: it did decent business, it kept his name before the public until he reached them in person, no doubt very surprised that the coarse ham of the film was the same person as the eloquent, passionate votary of the muses that addressed them so ardently from the stage of their town hall or social club. As it happens, and perversely enough, the performance was in some quarters (
Time
magazine, for example) hailed as return to form. ‘How good it is to see Mr Laughton enjoying himself again.’ In fact there is no shred of enjoyment in the performance; it is ice for father’s piles with a vengeance.
Monthly Film Bulletin
assessed the film more drily: ‘A costume shocker which is by no means devoid of atmosphere. Charles Laughton appears to overact – perhaps to assure us of the Comte’s insanity. The other players perform in the usual convention.’

It was again Paul Gregory who turned Charles in the direction of his next venture. Seeing the extraordinary impact of Charles, unaided by
scenery
or props, he asked why not two actors? Or more? Perhaps reading a play, or part of a play, or even something non-dramatic: Shaw’s Prefaces, for example. Laughton suggested the third act of
Man and Superman
, known as
Don Juan in Hell
. And they knew they were onto something. It was Gregory who insisted that it would best be performed on a bare stage, in front of podia, in evening dress, instead of the cloaks favoured by Laughton, and that Charles Boyer should play Juan, which Laughton had fancied for himself; and in all these things Gregory was right.

Cedric Hardwicke was recruited to play the Statue, and finally Agnes Moorehead was cast as Doña Ana. Laughton wrote to Shaw for permission to perform the piece and received a reply of characteristic lucidity and pertinence from the nonagenarian writer, giving the performing history of the rarely performed Hell Scene, and entering a note of discouragement: ‘It is such a queer business that I cannot honestly advise you to experiment with it … as you know it is customarily omitted, and was never meant to be played. I fear that audiences will think it nothing but a pack of words.’ But the Drama Quartette, as they had named themselves, were not to be daunted, and how right they were. Starting gently, at Claremount, California, they gained momentum till by the time they reached Los Angeles they were an unstoppable force. ‘One of the most exciting experiences of this and any other season,’ said
Variety
. When they reached New York, the acclaim was unanimous. The box office was more remarkable even than that for the one-man show: they were playing vast auditoria, with capacities of three and four thousand. Gregory’s every calculation had been impeccable: the stars were all in difficulties with their film careers, and all of them were hungry for serious work in the theatre – Boyer had just played in Sartre’s
Les Mains Sales
in New York, while Hardwicke was bitterly cynical about Hollywood: ‘I believe that God felt sorry for actors so He created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent’. But they were still hugely popular in the provinces, which is where their main audience was to be found; there was a dearth of live theatre in those places; and there was something about being read to which seemed to feed a deep appetite in the audience. Perhaps Laughton was right when he said, à propos of his one-man show, ‘there is something about reading aloud to a group of people that turns them into children.’

Even sophisticated judges, however, felt that the Drama Quartette was a breakthrough: ‘Within an organism which continues to shrink
and
rot at such a rate as does America’s commercial theatre,’ wrote John Houseman in
Theatre Arts
, ‘every evidence of fresh growth and renewed vitality invites not only congratulations but also careful examination.’ J.B. Priestley thought they had invented something new, and proposed to write a piece for them. ‘I got excited about it. I saw there was in it the basis of a new form. You couldn’t call it drama – perhaps heightened debate or oratory.’ It is hard, and no doubt wrong, to judge the performance from the gramophone recording they made later. The four actors, possessed each of very distinctive voices, speak the lines with great intelligence and flair. In Boyer’s case, his characteristic French accent verges on the comic, but there is no other ground to find fault. Exciting, though, it certainly isn’t, and it is impossible to discern the
virtuosity
so commonly attributed to the performance. It is undramatic in the extreme. Of course, that is in the nature of the piece, whose author doubted its dramatic, as opposed to literary, worth. It is an intellectual exchange, a tennis match of ideas. Whether the ideas themselves are really very searching is perhaps beside the point; or perhaps not. Sir Thomas Beecham said of the English that they didn’t like music, they just liked the noise it made. It may be that the American audiences didn’t like the ideas, they just liked the noise they made.

At the time, Eric Bentley wrote: ‘Praising the Drama Quartette, people are saying how nice it is to do without scenery. I do not share their disdain for stage design, but I am not surprised at it. What surprises me is the assumption that, when a play is read to us, nothing is missing but the décor … It is a mistake to regard the Drama Quartette as a solution to our problems. We can settle for nothing less than acting, as it was, is, and ever shall be.’ Charles Laughton would not have shared that view. He was finding a new way in the theatre. Certainly he was finding a new way for himself; coming quite soon after the first New York performances of his one-man show,
Don Juan
clinched his return to form. He was an actor re-born, for critics and public alike. The accolade of a
Time
magazine cover was awarded him. The profile within, entitled ‘Every Night is Amateur Night’, and subtitled ‘The Happy Ham’, was couched in somewhat ironic terms; but there was no hedging the phenomenality of what he was doing and how many people wanted to see him do it. He was now, irrevocably, the Word Man.