My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Matters were beginning to get rather more serious by 1982. Simon Stokes, Jenny Topper and Nicky Pallot now formed a directorial triumvirate, and were slowly transforming the place into what it has since become. Everything at the Bush was still done on a shoestring, but it was a shoestring of infinitely expandable dimensions. For Loving Reno, Grant Hicks designed an ambitious set which was simultaneously an airport lounge, an amphitheatre and the inside of a cranium. It was hugely complicated and strange, fashioned out of materials begged, borrowed but very rarely bought. It was installed to an impressively high level of finish – as it had to be; sets at the Bush were inevitably submitted to very close scrutiny, with the audience only inches away from the stage. There was no question, in those days, of any limitation on the hours that the actors or the theatre staff would work; as a production came close to opening, all outside life, any attempt at regular meals or sleep, was abandoned, and an increasingly hag-ridden team, sustained largely by roll-ups and pints from the pub below, would doggedly ensure that the latest vision was realised in that tiny little black room above the pub.

  The pub itself really was, in those days, a pub, run by stout Irish Tommy and his incomputably large family. He and indeed all of them were robustly indifferent to what was actually going on in the room above, though perfectly friendly and delightful to all of us who worked there. The local clientele of the pub, equally oblivious of the dubious goings-on upstairs, were less tolerant of the influx of poncey theatre buffs and puffs coming between them and the next pint at around eight o’clock. The lavatories were properly pungent and awash with misdirected urine; no concessions to West End standards there. Of course it was vexing for the theatre lot to be artificially yoked to this counter-culture, but it was also healthy, in its way. A certain roughness in the experience prevented it from drifting away from life altogether. Backstage, conditions were on the primitive side of rough. The dressing rooms were on the other side of the auditorium from the stage; a small cupboard, modestly divided into male and female with a curtain held up by gaffer tape. During The Soul of the White Ant, Clive Merrison had first to cover himself with soil, then to wash himself spotless, in this cupboard, with all the rest of us dancing around him. No matter how large or small your part, you had to sit there from beginning to end of the show – although it was possible to get round to the other entrance, the one by the door, by going down the back stairs and running, in costume and make-up, down the Goldhawk Road and back through the pub, forcing one’s way through the mystified regulars, by now on their fourth or fifth round of the evening. Nightly I made my entrance as Princess Anne by this route, with ponytail and jodhpurs, to much rubbing of eyes.

  The stage manager for a large portion of my time at the Bush was the charismatic Dutchman, Bart Cossee, the shy focus of many fantasies, no whit discouraged by his habit of wearing black string vests through which his rippling musculature was sharply visible. He was of that breed of stage manager who, having had a maximum of two hours of sleep and half a sandwich, risk life and limb twenty times a day, wiring up live fittings, swinging from the rafters, heaving vast skips around, and then quietly and nonchalantly sipping a pint at two o’clock in the morning. Heroes, they are, and the Bush somehow found an inexhaustible supply of them.

  After Loving Reno, I had two last stints at the Bush, both as a performer: the first was in another obscure one-man show, Melancholy Jacques, this time about the philosopher Rousseau, a sublimely cryptic meditation in which the audience were made to feel as if they were overhearing – barely – an almost in comprehensible private monologue on the subjects of art and love. Again, astonishingly, this seemed to work, and cast a considerable spell. One night the tent in which I was supposed to be spending the night, brewing my Nescaff, burst into flames; neither I nor the audience were at all animated by this, as I placidly doused the flames with Evian water, not interrupting my meditation for a minute. The second show was even more incendiary, though not quite so literally. It was Kiss of the Spider Woman, which, again, I had brought to the Bush, and which it had taken Jenny and Simon and Nicky exactly half an hour to decide to do. A genuine masterpiece – oddly neglected – by the novelist Manuel Puig, it was given an exquisite production by Simon Stokes, with Robin Don’s masterly set, which converted the auditorium into the interior of an Argentine jail, the textures scrupulously and perfectly realistically painted by the great team of Gordon Stewart and Andrew Wood, now both dead.

  Mark Rylance and I enacted the story of the improbable and tender romance that blossoms between Molina, the camp little queen, and Valentin, the determinedly heterosexual revolutionary hero, incarcerated in the same cell, and despite indifferent or non-existent notices (it was widely ignored by the broadsheets), it played to bursting houses, in an atmosphere of emotional intensity that I have never before, and alas, never since, encountered in any performance of which I was a part. The Bush is able to generate, given the right play, and the right production, a mood which is like none another, not even in comparable theatres; despite the least comfortable seats in London – perhaps the world – and an odd L-shaped configuration, and primitive air conditioning, and the roar of the Goldhawk Road’s traffic, and the occasional throb of a distant rock band, there is a complicity between performers and audience which is both intimate and epic, which somehow fans the actors into blazing life, and which has informed an astonishing range and scale of work. There was talk at the time of transferring Kiss of the Spider Woman to another theatre, but much as I loved the piece, I was glad it never happened. The experience that Mark and I and the few hundred people who saw the show that sultry summer had was unique, and uniquely right, pure Bush. There’s nothing quite like it.

  Life was joyously expanding in every direction, it seemed. In reality, 1984, as I have written elsewhere, exceeded, for me, Orwell’s worst projections: my adored friend Peggy Ramsay was found to have cancer of the breast, at the age of seventy-five no picnic; she overcame it, but her struggle against it seemed to me to have hastened the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in her. And hard on the heels of that, my partner Aziz Yehia, a beautiful, brilliantly gifted and personally enchanting man, exhausted by the depredations of his bipolar condition, did away with himself.

  I was acting in a play at the time, On the Spot by Edgar Wallace. I found great strength in the age-old imperatives of the profession to keep going at all costs. The play was a dark and joyless one; thank God. I don’t think I could have faked the inner blitheness demanded by comedy. I wrote a note on the play for the programme.

  On the Spot is a play which bursts with naked power and sexual passion – a wholly credible evocation of the world of Prohibition Chicago, at its centre the Capone-inspired figure of Tony Perelli, ruthless and half-crazed with power and lust.

  Who was the Englishman who wrote this? A very remarkable one indeed as it turned out. Of course I knew his name from a hundred book spines and from the opening titles of a series of British B-movies of the Fifties and Sixties in which his apparently dead body, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, revolved, swathed in smoke, in lurid black-and-white while an electric guitar pounded out chords of suspense and danger. I had no inkling then of the astonishing life and prodigious output of the man, his powers of invention or the popularity and widespread love which attended him, both as man and writer. He was a phenomenon: poet, journalist, novelist, short-story writer (seven hundred of these alone), playwright, screenwriter, stage director, film director, racehorse owner, bon viveur, chronic bankrupt; what he crammed into his fifty-seven years almost defies belief. Most remarkable of all, a great deal of what he wrote is of very high quality, including a clutch of works which have passed into the cultural subconscious: The Four Just Men, Sanders of the River, and the work on which he was engaged just before he died, King Kong. But the finest thing he ever did was On the Spot.

  Its genesis is unusual. Invited across the Atlantic by his American publishers (he was as famous in the States as in England – during the trip he signed
1,250 autographs), the greatest crime-writer in the world was drawn irresistibly to the city of crime, Chicago. He made a special detour. Twenty-four hours was all he could spare, but he spent every minute of it being shown the notorious sites of gangsterdom: the garage of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, O’Bannion’s flower shop, the morgue. His guides were the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Chicago Police Department, and it was to them that he dedicated his play. He left the city laden with pictures and clippings of Capone, the homicidal grandee who now filled his imagination. The five-day journey back to England on the Berengaria found him brooding and silent. As soon as he docked he summoned his secretary, Jenia Reissar, and started, at midnight, to dictate. Within three days, the play was finished. Within weeks it was in production, with Charles Laughton as Tony Perelli. It was the biggest theatrical success of either man’s career.

  The vividness and accuracy of the master-journalist, combined with the master-showman’s timing and manipulation of effect, have given the play an electric charge which is as powerful now as fifty years ago – but its authenticity is astonishing. This happened. Wallace’s play is a front-line report. Its truth and urgency is not dulled by the clichés of the genre, because he was inventing the genre. It was the first gangster play, and appeared before any of the contemporary gangster films were released. It presents an almost Jacobean vision: a world writhing with energy and desire but terminally corrupt. The judiciary, the police, the senate – all are corrupt. One cop struggles against an entire system – and when he finally gets his man, it’s by a bitter irony – a miscarriage of justice. The play’s vision is at once harsh and vital, horrible and exciting. Webster or Ford would have understood these people; Machiavelli would have recognised their world.

  I knew of the play because of Charles Laughton’s involvement in the original production, of which a wonderful account is given in Emlyn Williams’s autobiography. (Williams came to our first night at the Albery Theatre, fifty-four years after appearing in that first production, just round the corner at Wyndham’s. By now, he couldn’t remember a thing about it.) I wanted to know more about Laughton’s theatre acting – more about him. For the most part, though, I found precious little of value in the extant books. Charles Higham’s biography was written under the aegis of Elsa Lanchester, who was intent on revenging herself on her late husband; Higham later told me hair-raising stories about how she had set private detectives on to Laughton, and wanted the biographer to print the photographs they had taken of him in flagrante delicto. The other biographies were cobbled together from press cuttings and, worse, press releases. None of them had anything to say about his acting, so I decided to fill the gap; this was to be my second book, again for Nick Hern. I have no idea what occasion provoked this piece, or when I wrote it; as far as I know it was never printed. It is called Looking for Laughton and describes my first faltering foray into biography.

  For the last two years I have been, more or less single-handedly, the Charles Laughton Industry: I have written a biography of him, recorded a documentary about him for radio and filmed one for television, and next Monday I deliver the Guardian lecture on him at the National Film Theatre. The curious thing is that all this has come not from obsession, still less identification, but from the clear realisation in the spring of 1984 that I was not him. I was doing a play that he had made famous in 1930, On the Spot, and I was unable to make it work, which caused me to ponder how he had managed it. Most of us draw our performances from what is written on the page: he had brought an altogether extra dimension to a character that is essentially a lurid stereotype. He had made people believe in him, to a frightening degree. He had taken the outline Edgar Wallace handed him and filled it with truth – in this case, a very ugly truth. This was an act of creation: of what order, I wanted to know.

  He was, I should say, among the half-dozen most fascinating actors of the century, and a handful of his performances have a power and a scale that demand comparison with the work of painters and poets. It was clear that his life in art was a kind of quest which took him into unusual areas for an actor.

  I was an egregiously amateur explorer into those areas. I had an idea of the kind of book I wanted to write. It was Laughton’s acting I was concerned with; and it was acting itself I wanted to write about, with only as much about the actor’s life as would illuminate that. I had no truck with those biographies that concerned themselves only with their subjects’ careers or with the occupants of their beds. I read them, of course, and not without pleasure. My objection to them was simply that they contributed nothing to an understanding of acting as either craft or art. That was what had led me to want to write the book in the first place.

  My first book, Being an Actor, was about the actor as Everyman, and attempted to delineate the common experience of actors by looking at the professional experience of one average young actor – me. In the Laughton book I set out to look at the work of a genius – to see what heights might be scaled with acting, what the conditions were for that sort of greatness. Laughton was, in my view, one of the very greatest actors who lived; even Laurence Olivier, who hated him, described him as a genius.

  When I was trying to play Tony Perelli in On the Spot, I turned to the only available biography, and to Laughton’s wife’s autobiography, and there was virtually nothing in either about the performance as such, or about how he’d achieved it – let alone what he was trying to achieve in general. The best book I know about any actor as an artist is Parker Tyler’s Chaplin: Last of the Clowns, and I modelled myself on him, hoping to emulate something of the searching analysis and openness to resonance of his work. I would like to have written in his deliciously fancy-pants prose, too, but I wisely refrained from even trying. Another influence was Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great, which eschews any attempt at novelish continuity or authorial omniscience and instead stops the flow again and again to say: what does such and such bare fact mean? What is its context? In doing so, it opens doors on history which no seamless narrative could hope for. Those were my models – but actually doing the work was something else.

  I knew nothing about research, where to go, how to look, how to take notes. I had help: the publisher provided me with a hundred man-hours of it. The man whose hours I was given was a very agreeable and thorough Canadian who, at my behest, found the cast list and credits of every picture and play Laughton had been involved with, marked those 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; and then it was over to me. I read every word anybody had ever written about Laughton; I read every play he’d ever performed, and every original source from which any of his films had been drawn. 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 Sony recorder I could find, and sometimes it worked, though not too well, alas, when I spoke to Billy Wilder. I was so awed at eating bagels with the director of Sunset Boulevard and Some Like it Hot that I never asked him to stop swivelling round in his chair like that and could he possibly close the window? But he had astonishing things to say, and made me laugh again and again. What was wonderful about our conversation was his unreserved enthusiasm for Laughton, and his certainty that not only was he a great actor but a great intellect, too: ‘He was a renaissance man,’ Wilder said, and it rejoiced my heart.

  I interviewed over fifty people, 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 (the director Michael Blakemore it was) 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 an astonishing 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 who had designed Laughton’s season at the Old Vic and his flat in Bloomsbury; to Robert Mitchum, who chose to answer me only in monosyllables: it was like trying to make small talk with Mount Rushmore. I tried to speak to Christopher Isherwood, who refused, most courteously. He died not long afterwards – I realise now that he didn’t want to talk about someone who had died of the same disease that was killing him – but not before I had dropped a copy of my first book through his letter box. A year later I phoned his partner Don Bachardy to see whether he might have something to say. He 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 the drawing, he showed it to me: it was an extraordinary thing, half me and half Laughton. And when he’d shown me the picture, it somehow released him to talk about Laughton: and what he said provided me with some of the most acute insights of anyone I spoke to.