Charles Laughton (46 page)

The production itself suffered from all these contradictory impulses: something along the lines of Elia Kazan’s Miller and Tennessee Williams productions may have served it better. As Tynan did not fail to point out, any attempt of Laughton’s to create a realistic English suburban scene was absurd: he knew nothing about it. ‘The action seems to unfold in a timeless nowhere. The hero has a wife who speaks perfect Schools Programme English and is his junior by twenty-five years, yet the disparities in age and accent are never even mentioned, let alone explained. They are broke, yet manage, with one lodger, to run the kind of mansion, all bookcases and pale beaming, that you would expect a visiting film-star to take near Henley for the summer.
Their
closest friend is a rowdy coquette who talks like the late Suzette Tarri and owns what everyone weirdly calls “the nylon shop”.’

Laughton had expended a great deal of time on casting the part of Ettie and, having flirted with the notion of using Maggie Smith (who, he said, ‘showed some signs of genius,’ reminding him of Laurette Taylor), settled on Ann Lynn, who was then immediately proclaimed a ‘discovery’ and a ‘star in the making’. Laughton was convinced that the character was ‘like something out of Barrie, a fairy-tale character, sensitive and delicate,’ a description which applied admirably to Ann Lynn, but not at all to Ettie, on the evidence of the play. Similarly, he cast Joyce Redman, vivacious, forceful comedienne, as the drab and downtrodden wife, with Elsa as the proprietress of ‘the nylon shop’. Both leading actresses found his direction difficult to take, Redman finding him frankly incomprehensible, Lynn, inexperienced and personally insecure, being overawed by his personal authority; she, too, was baffled by his tendency to speak in abstracts: ‘this scene is blue, and it’s Bartók,’ he puzzlingly told her. He made the cardinal error of any actor-director: he spoke to his cast in terms which would mean something to him, but meant nothing to them. How he might have longed for a director to tell
him
that a scene was blue and Bartok! He had cast the part of the potential boyfriend (vexingly named Soya) more happily: he gave Albert Finney his London début in the rôle, having seen him as Macbeth at Birmingham (‘you were bloody awful, but what can you expect at your age?’). He felt a huge paternal warmth towards this Northern lad, direct, unactorish, of the real world. ‘Actors are useful people,’ he wrote later, ‘you can tell a lot about what England is like today from Albert Finney.’ Ann Rogers, Laughton’s personal assistant, thought that they were ‘like Falstaff and Hal together.’ Tynan wrote ‘Mr Finney shares the play’s best scene with Mr Laughton, who rises like a salmon to the occasion; few young actors have ever got a better performance out of their directors.’

As for Elsa Lanchester, who had no faith in the play anyway, she gave her well-known cabaret performance, while John Welsh as the lodger, played, as always, with quiet distinction. The play ran decently enough for its six months, coming off in November. It is, like
Major Barbara
, a curiously mixed episode, neither one thing nor the other. Laughton was clearly searching for some kind of expression, but never found it. No central informing notion seems to have lain behind his approach. Casting was quirky, staging uncertain or misconceived, and his own performance interpretatively somewhat neutral. He could never fail to make an impact, and, even misapplied,
his
talent was original and compelling. But what was he getting at? He wanted to be part of the modern world, but had none of Olivier’s instinctive sense of which horse to back. He had thought long and deep about the theatre and acting, but seemed to have reached a point of complexity in his conclusions where all the many strands of his reflection cancelled each other out, resulting in something, both in his performances and his productions, rather low-key and undefined. The parameters of his vision were becoming blurred, as if, perhaps, he no longer sought to realise it: the vision was an end in itself.

During the run of
The Party
, however, a concrete proposition was put to him: Glen Byam Shaw, planning the centenary season at Stratford, invited him to play King Lear. ‘He didn’t answer and said he must be going. We said our goodbyes. He left. Two minutes later he popped his head round the door and said, ‘If you asked me to play King Lear here, I should find it hard to refuse.’ The formula he chose is significant: ‘I should find it hard to refuse.’ In other words: ‘I have been thinking about this play all my life; I owe it to myself, Shakespeare and the audience to do it.’ He went back to America at the end of
The Party
to prepare for it. He also agreed to play Bottom. In the midst of his urgent meditations, he was signed to act in the blockbuster,
Spartacus
. It was only thirteen days’ work, but it earned him a welcome $41,000.

The film’s producer also played the title rôle: Kirk Douglas. He had assembled his galaxy of stars (Laurence Olivier, John Gavin, Tony Curtis, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons as well as Laughton) by sending each a version of the script in which he or she appeared to have the largest, most interesting part. The resulting mayhem, with temperaments being exercised and resignations being threatened, characterised the whole period of shooting. The director, Anthony Mann, was the first casualty; his replacement, Stanley Kubrick, remained
hors bataille
, simply arranging the physical aspects of the film as best he might (which was very well indeed: he creates a credible Roman Empire that is more convincing than any epic before or since). The actors, meanwhile, thrashed out the dialogue between themselves. Olivier, with his mastery of backstage politics, had been the first on the scene, with the result that his part was in considerably better shape than most – than Laughton’s, for example, who fell into a heavy and suspicious sulk from the first day, convinced that Olivier was out to destroy him. Fortunately, most of his scenes were with Ustinov, who
volunteered
to re-write them, to which Laughton happily acceded. Together they concocted the scenes that ended up in the film: Kubrick, according to Ustinov, simply shot them.

Laughton’s pleasure in his work with Ustinov is palpable. The sensuous liberal senator Gracchus is a character to whom Charles could give himself unreservedly. His oratory in the senate gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his rhetorical gifts at their most vital (and pertinent); the eating scene with Ustinov is a miracle of sly and bashful hedonism. His warm, fleshy integrity makes the perfect balance to his opponent and rival, Crassus, played by Olivier.

The on-screen antagonism was perhaps not difficult for Laughton to summon up. Relations between them on the floor were frosty but polite. ‘We got on quite splendidly’, wrote Olivier, ‘though I was a bit distressed at what I considered to be his discourtesies on the set, and told him so.’ Communication between them was limited by mutual wariness. Laughton envied Olivier his physical access to a range of parts that he could never play; Olivier, for his part, envied Laughton’s individuality of mind and body. It is perhaps not too much of a simplification to say that Laughton envied Olivier’s capacity to do, Olivier was jealous of Laughton’s ability to be. Both were essentially character actors, but Laughton rummaged among the capacious folds of his own personality for his rôles, while Olivier built new men on top of his. Olivier, of course, had long ago eclipsed Laughton as a classical actor in the eyes of the world, and yet there was something about Laughton that would never be his. Laughton had followed a private path, replete with cul-de-sacs and dead ends, towards a destination that he could never define, let alone reach; Olivier had bowled down the highway in pursuit of the greatest prizes, which he had easily won. The maddening thing for Olivier was that Laughton, despite having become demonstrably lost, had somehow retained his stature; the intolerable thing for Laughton was that despite approaching art and life like an athlete, rather than as an artist, Olivier had somehow penetrated the secrets of the greatest rôles.

The chance for Godzilla, as it were, to meet King Kong, was lost when, whether entirely seriously or not, Laughton asked Olivier to direct him as King Lear. (Perhaps not entirely sincerely, because it was not in Laughton’s gift: Glen Byam Shaw was going to direct it; though no doubt something could have been arranged.) Olivier said no: ‘Because I really did not believe that he and I would get on as I really never could understand what he said to me – which meant that I was not intellectually his equal. I never really felt on quite the same
level
as he. What the hell would be the use of
my
directing
him
if I felt like that.’ Instead he offered him some advice: ‘If he wanted to play Lear he must go to the top of the hill on his estate every morning when the sun rose and breathe and shout the lines until he was exhausted. He rather pooh-poohed the idea.’ Of course; Olivier was talking to the man who, when he phoned Glen Byam Shaw to accept the part, had said: ‘Meet you at Stonehenge tomorrow’.
And he meant it
. Olivier’s excellent advice – excellent, that is, as far as it goes, like Gielgud’s advice about getting a light Cordelia – was anathema to Laughton. Olivier was interested in setting himself difficult challenges that he could crack. He won his greatness by conquering great rôles: Jack the Giant-Killer. Thus he is often to be found belittling his characters: ‘Lear is easy, he’s just a stupid old fart. He’s got this frightful temper. He’s completely selfish and utterly inconsiderate. He does not for a moment think of the consequences of what he has said. He is simply bad-tempered arrogance with a crown perched on top. He obviously wasn’t spanked by his mother often enough. I mean, to turn away from his favourite daughter like that, what kind of an idiot is he?’ The shade of Laughton seems to shudder at the very echo of Olivier’s words from
On Acting
. For Laughton, the greatness of the great rôles resided in their unfathomable complexity, the depths of experience which they explored and embodied, and the dignity and importance of acting them was that one attempted to realise some part of that complexity. The horror of acting, and the reason one shied away from it, even, one might say,
evaded
it, was the impossibility of getting anywhere near fulfilling it.

The terrible paradox, however, is that, whatever the vulgarity and reductiveness of Olivier’s conception of a part, his physical command of both the text and his own instrument resulted in performances which far exceeded the limitations of his interpretations. The part installed itself in his chords and limbs, and took on a life of its own; whereas no matter how profound and imaginative Laughton’s connection with the inner life of the play, the constriction of his physical apparatus meant that the point of ignition never arrived. A further terrible paradox is that Olivier’s shorter perspectives meant that he drew energy from the achievability of his objectives; Laughton was wearied by the task before he’d even begun.

Gielgud and Olivier were regarded (principally by Olivier) as rivals, each gifted in ways that the other would like to have been. But their theatre was the same theatre; they were running the same race. Olivier and Laughton, however, could hardly be said to be practising the
same
art. Laughton the deep-sea diver who had to keep coming up for air, Olivier the surfer whose skill took him to places he never meant to go; they had the sea in common, but that was all.

In
Spartacus
, the two modes can be seen side by side: Olivier, in what is perhaps a trial run for his Coriolanus, which he was about to play in Stratford in the same season as Charles would play Lear, plays Crassus like a knife: it is an entirely linear performance with every point brilliantly made. His glacial patrician manner, his ruthless ambition, his strong desire for his handsome young slave, are all cleanly and sharply indicated; it is as if there were a thin black line drawn around the role. Laughton’s Gracchus has no such boundaries, no such definition. It spreads, floats, expands, contracts. The whole massive expanse of flesh seems to be filled with mind – thoughts are conceived, born and die in different parts of that far-flung empire. Sedentary for the most part, Gracchus seethes with potential movement. He is a jelly that has escaped the mould; Olivier’s (and Crassus’s) sharp knife can gain no purchase on it. Not surprisingly, when the time came for Olivier to shoot the close-ups for his big scene with Charles, he sweetly indicated that he would find it easier to do if Charles weren’t actually around. Charles was triumphantly hurt by this.

Olivier was of course right about the
Lear
. How could they possibly have worked together? When
Spartacus
finished, they went off to their separate preparations for the coming season of which they were the twin pillars. Larry went into training to lick a particularly tricky bugger, Coriolanus; Charles took thought, then loaded himself up with the spiritual provisions he would need on his terrible trip to the bottom of the ocean called Lear.

Shakespeare

IN A SENSE
, of course, Laughton had been preparing for
King Lear
all his life. From the moment he started giving interviews, he had been alluding to the play, sometimes representing it as the ultimate summit, sometimes as a byword for the irrelevance of Shakespeare to the modern world, depending on how defensive he felt at any moment. He never ceased to feel, from the beginning, that an actor’s
proper
place was in the theatre, playing the classics; but he often felt excluded from the charmed circles where his contribution might be acknowledged. So – and this is typical of his way – he denounced the classics and embraced the movies, claiming for them all kinds of greatness, potential and actual, which would make his involvement in them seem important, would give his life value. In time, however, his passionate attentions to the art of film were received more coolly, until finally, in high dudgeon, he turned his back on them, condescending to return to them only for commercial considerations. By now, his enthusiasm had moved elsewhere: to the touring circuit, person to person contact with the people, spreading The Word. Literally the
word
; people, he discovered, were hungry for stories and the stirring phrases which the movies, with their growing illiteracy, had denied them. And among the stories and the phrases were, of course, many by Shakespeare. Not that he had ever for a moment, in his heart, left off loving Shakespeare, studying Shakespeare, puzzling over Shakespeare. Shakespeare was his breviary, his rosary, his private devotion. Shakespeare was also his crossword puzzle, his unsolved equation, his everlasting riddle. But most of all, Shakespeare was his Great White Whale, haunting and mocking him, appearing tantalisingly on the horizon of whatever waters he might be amiably paddling, or perhaps (his favourite posture for contemplation) floating in, as Peter Ustinov put it, ‘like a topsy-turvy iceberg,’ and all the roles and all the plays had somehow dissolved before The One,
Lear
. It touched his life at so many points that he had come to see the play as his spiritual autobiography: the man more sinned against than sinning, but who, demonstrably, had brought his fate on his own head; the man engaged in a baffling journey through pain and despair towards – hopefully – some sort of tender resolution.