Charles Laughton (21 page)

There are many accounts of Laughton’s overbrimming histrionic appetite, particularly in impromptu situations, for an audience of one, or half a dozen. The anguish and doubt disappeared, and the sheer joy of self-expression overwhelmed his listeners. Spontaneity, his most elusive quality, was suddenly present: but it was a prepared spontaneity; Laughton was no inventor, no improviser; he had lingered long and lovingly over his texts, and they were ready to surge out of him on any wave of emotional freedom that might come by.

With
Cyrano
, he was really formidably thorough. It is unusual for an actor to be as well prepared for a part even when he’s actually filming it; Laughton was still only at the preliminary stage.

First he acted the text in French. That is considerable testimony to his fluency. Rostand’s text is one of continuous virtuosity, rhythmically difficult, a torrent of tongue-twisting quibbles and sallies. Laughton demonstrated to Wolfe how the
ballade
in Act One was constructed to the rhythm of fencing strokes. Immediately after performing in French, he performed Wolfe’s version (‘he was word-perfect’). ‘Laughton stood before me smiling. “I see,” he said, “that you agree. Your version may be a better
ballade
, but I can’t fence it.”’

They discussed the difference between the French and English approach to romantic themes, the possible translation of the word ‘panache’, they considered cuts, the re-shaping of passages.
‘Laughton
put the play in training, and was sweating off its redundant fat in order to get it into perfect condition for the race.’

All this is above and beyond anything that might reasonably have been expected of any leading actor, and it betokens enormous energy, intelligence, and, of course, seriousness on Laughton’s part. None of these qualities would have guaranteed a good performance of the role, but the whole episode lends credence to his later statement that ‘acting in the movies takes up about a tenth of my energy.’ He was overflowing with unfulfilled creativity.

As for the script: it was handed over to Lajos Birò, who made a tentative camera script, which he and Wolfe then worked on. A director of photography was engaged (von Sternberg’s cameraman, Lee Garmes; nothing but the best); noses were made (Christopher Morahan recalls his father, Tom, the production designer, making dozens of false noses, until one was finally settled on and ceremonially unveiled).

Agate had lunch with Charles and Korda during this time: ‘Charles who is a great baby as well as a genius delightedly showed us the mechanical arrangement for Cyrano’s cock-a-hoop bearing which are to enable him to give all his attention to Cyrano’s crowing. He is to have the heels of his shoes shaved and the soles raised, and illustrated this by means of two books which Korda threw on the floor. One was by Lytton Strachey and the other by Eisenstein.’

But the inherent uncommerciality of a film in verse about a seventeenth century Gascon knight with a large nose must finally have daunted even Korda, who, as so often, simply moved on to a new enthusiasm: a life of Rembrandt. Warner Brothers were beginning their cycle of biographical movies with Paul Muni, so Korda had better get on with it quick.

Humbert Wolfe was left stranded and baffled, clutching an unwanted manuscript. ‘Weeks passed during which my hopes were proved dupes, and my fears were emphatically not traitors. Silence brooded over the waters, and whatever doves I sent forth to Denham, elsewhere, returned.’

Korda finally sold the rights in the play to Stanley Kramer, who made a dull film of it – in prose – with José Ferrer. There is however a ghostly glimpse of Laughton’s performance at the beginning of a Deanna Durbin vehicle of the late forties,
Because of Him
, which opens with Laughton’s
curtain-call
as a ham actor playing Cyrano for the last time; some kind of private joke, no doubt.

The ‘upper-part in Gordon Square’ that Wolfe had visited was the new flat Elsa Lanchester had found for them. The impression of this flat created by photographs is one of austerity. The architect of the reconstruction was Wells Coates, creator of the notorious Permanent Setting at the Old Vic, and one of the most fashionable architects of the day. He emphasised the straight clean line of the walls, and introduced sliding doors in between the two main rooms. These doors were decorated, flora on one side, and fauna on the other, by the Laughton’s witty friend John Armstrong. His delicate poetic touch would have added a cool pastel dimension to the impact of the place, but essentially it remained plain, going on austere. The most lavishly decorated section of the flat was the servants’ quarters, which Laughton, typically, had commissioned Heal’s of Tottenham Court Road to furnish. This means that they would have been the acme of sober luxury – very different from the nearly Oriental starkness prevailing below.

Laughton’s solicitude, not to say anxiety, in matters relating to his domestic staff verged on the comic, and had its obvious origins in his own experience of
service
. He loathed anything resembling command, on his side, or servility, on theirs, and went to great lengths to avoid unduly troubling them. Elsa Lanchester’s description of their household in the mid-30s is richly funny. It was evidently a somewhat Chekhovian establishment, with Nellie Boxall, the cook (inherited from Virginia Woolf, so quite unfazed by raffishness), and a housemaid, ‘a communist’, according to Lanchester, up in arms for one reason or another, calling the Laughtons ‘idle rich’. The Laughtons countered this by referring to the servants as ‘serfs’ or ‘slaves’. ‘A mad house – but spotless and efficient, and – according to Charles – as well run as any household he knows.’

Very likely. His sense of management was in the blood and in the bones. The starkness of their personal accommodation does, however, come as a surprise, though in fact it is entirely characteristic. Neither he nor Elsa enjoyed luxury or clutter. The ‘tree-house’ in Stapledown was similarly plain and unadorned, and the subsequent American houses followed suit. The luxuriance of Laughton’s physique and the juiciness of his persona lead one to expect a corresponding expansiveness in his environment, but his girth and the amplitude of his characterisation are in that sense deceptive. His acting was highly selective, made up of strong clear strokes – nothing messy or impressionistic about it; it was, if anything, expressionist, strong bleeding colours applied with incisive directness. His mind
was
similarly clear and as far as one can judge, uncluttered. When he knew a thing, he really knew it. Later, as a director both in the theatre and on film, he proved to be above all a sterling editor and shaper: he had a wonderful sense of selection and placement. He and Elsa were both passionate flower lovers, but he was supreme as a flower arranger (a skill he preferred to keep quiet about, telling Elsa to claim responsibility). In one of the photographs of the flat, there is a bowl with a strikingly arranged bunch of twigs. Constance Spry was a best friend, and they would fight over adjustments of a millimetre. In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that Laughton should have been drawn to Japan: Hokusai, the tea-ceremony, flower-arranging, and that the most satisfying image of him should remain the collage Brecht made of him as a Zen master on a pony.

From his youth, painting, sculpture, drawing, all that is called Art, were his great passion. There was nothing artsy-fartsy about it: there was real, intense, physical response to line and form and colour. His relationship to painting was not intellectual, but sensual. On another level, however, it was an
essentially
intellectual response, because it was the abstract qualities in it that so mesmerised him. There are many accounts of Laughton’s ability to stand, or preferably sprawl on the floor, in front of a painting for literally hours, till every inch of the canvas penetrated his consciousness. It’s very striking that it was not representational art, which in a literal sense can be very useful to an actor, but an art of pure forms that meant so much to him – doubly striking in that he constantly strove somehow to inform his acting, transform his acting, with its qualities. This is a task some miles removed from ‘playing the truth of the character in the situation’, and other such reductive prescriptions. For Laughton, to adapt Pater’s phrase, all acting should aspire to the condition of art, the highest, the purest art; neither photography nor the work of Madame Tussaud falling, in his opinion, into that category.

His career as a collector had started early, in Scarborough, where he was able to decorate the Pavilion with engravings and paintings by at first local artists, then artists whose work he’d seen in London. Once established as an actor, he bought carefully and with great discrimination. Lanchester describes how they would put paintings on the wall at Gordon Square for a couple of months, then cupboard them, putting up other paintings in their place, after Gertrude Stein’s advice to stop the paintings ‘melting into the wall.’ For a brief while, Laughton even ran a little gallery displaying the works of actors; Bernard Miles showed in it.

But it was in 1935, in New York, that Laughton met the man who decisively influenced his taste, and put him into the big league as a collector: Dr Albert Barnes, owner of a substantial collection of impressionists. He it was who encouraged Laughton to shell out the $36,000 being asked for Renoir’s
Judgement of Paris
. It remained the centrepiece of Laughton’s collection, bought, I am inclined to believe, more out of deference to Barnes than his own taste, its candy floss treatment of the subject being unlike anything else Laughton ever owned. Barnes’ other tip, the black American primitive painter, Horace Pippin, seems more in Laughton’s line. He already had a Douanier Rousseau, and a Matthew Smith, works of weird poetic intensity, and continued to cultivate, for the rest of his collecting life, side by side with the abstract, works which embodied the naïveté and simplicity which became his ideal in life.

In
Rembrandt
, he had the opportunity to surround himself totally with beauty, to immerse himself in a painter’s life, to try to imagine the sensation of looking through a painter’s eye. He bought every book written about Rembrandt, he saw every possible canvas painted by Rembrandt, he studied every likeness made of Rembrandt. He and Korda went back and forth to Holland, where the curator of the Rembrandt Museum assembled a private show of all the available paintings, drawings and engravings; they studied treatises on painting and architecture; they found and shipped over Dutch furniture and pots and cloths.

Just before filming started, he undertook a little jaunt which must have seemed like a delightful idea but turned into a living nightmare. Maurice Chevalier invited him to participate in a gala at the Comédie Française to raise money for the family of a suddenly deceased
sociétaire
. He was to be the first English actor to perform at the Comédie since its foundation; he would, of course, perform in French. He enlisted the aid of his old teacher, Alice Gachet, and they chose an extract from Act Two of Molière’s
Le Médicin Malgré Lui
. So far, so jolly. Meticulous as ever, Laughton learned his part down to the last perfectly Pronounced syllable, and in due course, he and Gachet flew to Paris, where the full horror of the thing began to sink in, as it is inclined to do on galas. No matter how good the cause, regardless of the fact that you’re not being paid, you are still, you suddenly realise with a sickening churn of the stomach, about to stand on a stage in front of a lot of people who have paid a great deal of money to see you practise your art. All very well for singers, dancers, players of the marimba: they just have to get up and do it. The actor
has
to create some kind of reality, play some kind of character, say lines which are often quite unfamiliar to him. There’s never sufficient rehearsal, and the run-through is always abandoned just before they get to your bit.

If playing in a foreign language, multiply all these factors by a hundred. If playing with the regular company of the Comédie Française in 1936, just lie down and weep, because they have played this particular scene at least a million times, and their idea of rehearsal is to flick through their speeches at top speed, indicating movement and business with fluttering hands and daintily impressionistic foot movements. Add to this the news that the gala is due to start at midnight, that you are on last, and that you will be preceded by Serge Lifar and Maurice Chevalier, and you don’t even have to be Charles Laughton to want to kill yourself.

Charles Laughton wanted to kill himself very much indeed. According to Elsa Lanchester, he lay on his back and moaned, then he lay on his front and moaned. He kept this up with little variation until four o’clock in the morning, when his time finally came. The lights went up, he spoke, the other actors spoke. The audience did not speak. They did nothing. Were they still there? One surefire gag succeeded another in perfect silence – masterly inflection and perfectly timed pauses made no difference. The piece ended. The curtain fell: to ecstatic applause. Strangers embraced Laughton in the wings, down the corridors and in his dressing room, telling him how
funny
he’d been; never was seen such glorious comedy. Each gesture, each inflection was analysed. Laughton was presented with Molière’s walking stick, Sganarelle’s purse, Cyrano’s signet ring (irony!). He went off, dazed, into the night; or rather morning, it being 5 o’clock by now. The French papers told him that he was a great comic genius, and the English papers jubilated over ‘
Mr Charles Laughton’s Brilliant Paris Triumph
’. ‘Everybody said Charles was marvellous, and considering he is an Englishman who had only four days’ rehearsal, he was marvellous. But he knows, and I know, it was not a thoroughly good performance.’ (Elsa Lanchester)

Back, with relief, to
Rembrandt
. As only before on
Henry VIII
, Laughton was closely involved in every detail of the filming, present at design discussions with Korda’s brilliant brother, Vincent, at lighting discussions with the melancholy but inspired cameraman, Georges Périnal, and at casting sessions, where he put forward the names of many of his erstwhile associates at the Old Vic – Roger
Livesey
and Marius Goring among them. Elsa was to play Hendrickje Stoffels. (Other members of the strong cast include John Clements, Raymond Huntley, and, in one of her few film roles, Gertrude Lawrence.)