My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  I spoke to Laughton’s family. The 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. Exactly as predicted, the younger of the two started out vivaciously but quickly sank into gloom and finally deep silence, while the other talked wittily and sharply about Laughton as a boy to a castanet obbligato from the new teeth. His brother Tom’s widow thrilled me by telling me that she had a tape of a family gathering at one of Charles’s visits back home on which not only Charles but both his brothers and his mother speak. 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 obviously 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, and your homosexual is invariably promiscuous: it’s in his nature.’

  Eventually, I had amassed sufficient evidence to begin writing, when Nick Gray from Yorkshire TV called and suggested that it might be interesting to do a TV documentary as well. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest, this was a tremendous bonus because it meant that I could reach certain people that neither a book nor a radio documentary would lure (Robert Mitchum, for example); and a big organisation could provide further facilities for research, particularly in the celluloid sphere, and so it proved. Helen McGee, a genius cinema sleuth, tracked down extraordinary things, like a Movietone News sequence of Laughton making up as Perelli in his dressing room at Wyndham’s. We filmed the documentary as I was writing the book, so new discoveries could be fed from the one into the other. I wrote the book quickly, and, taking the proofs with me, I found myself in Los Angeles 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 demanded the Laughton archive. I sat in a somewhat clinical room waiting for it, cold sweat forming on my brow. The door opened and three trolleys were wheeled in containing the twenty-six boxes of the archive. A feverish search of the boxes revealed to my almost lachrymose relief that twenty-five of them contained screenplays 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 production of John Brown’s Body. I made my notes, asked for my photocopies, and ran for dear life. I had warned Nick Hern to hold the press; I was able to rewrite sufficiently quickly to accommodate what I had just discovered. Saved by the bell.

  Meanwhile, I had ventured into Laughton’s territory: film. In 1985, I wrote a piece for the Guardian, about my first film as an actor. They called it Acting Netcheral.

  Milos Forman was at the first preview of Amadeus at the National. We learned this from Peter Hall at a note session. Forman, it seemed, had loved the play, saying, ‘It’s just like Hollywood in the Thirties: Joseph II bought up all the available talent so no one else could have it, but then he didn’t know what to do with it.’ A good thought: and his approval of the production was encouraging and just what we needed. What we didn’t know was that Milos had decided there and then that Amadeus was to be his next film. His and Peter Shaffer’s agent, Robbie Lantz, was at the same performance, and immediately put the wheels in motion.

  We had other things on our minds: the press opening, the gratifying controversy, the unprecedented popularity of the play, the even more extraordinary reception of the play in New York. Of course a film would be made, but what kind of a film? Starring whom? In London there had been a steady procession of megastars hovering hungrily around like legacy hunters at a sickbed. Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro all passed through. Any or all of them seemed likely candidates.

  When, eventually, Milos Forman’s name was announced to direct it, that broadened the field. Forman was known to favour unknowns but now a new question entered our minds: were we sufficiently unknown?

  It was pleasant to read in Screen lnternational that Forman had cast Ian McKellen and me in the roles that we’d played on stage, Ian as Salieri in New York, me as Mozart in London. But neither we nor our agents had been informed, which seemed extremely forgetful at the very least. A call to the producer established that no casting had occur red, but there was every possibility that one would be playing the role. In the fullness of time, one would be informed.

  Rumours started. Every week, it seemed, a new cast was announced. Hottest tip for Mozart was Dudley Moore. Why not, one wondered, revive the Arthur team, and cast John Gielgud as Salieri with Liza Minnelli as Constanze? Further calls to the producer met increasingly ominous vagueness.

  Peter Shaffer was ensconced with Milos Forman, wrestling with the screenplay. He claimed casting was the last of their concerns. They weren’t even thinking about it till the script was right, which, as far as he could see, would be never. ‘What’s Forman like?’ I asked. Peter replied with a long feeling look, such as men use to tell of terrible wartime experiences at the hands of the Japanese. ‘It’s coming along,’ he’d say through a tightened jaw.

  Then one day a friend told me he’d been asked to screen test for the part of Mozart. I began to hear of more and more actors who’d been asked to screen test for the role. I became mildly bitter. Only mildly because everything one had heard or experienced of movies taught one that their makers believe themselves to be Nietzschean figures beyond the codes of ordinary human decency. It was a surprise, then, to get a call from the producer saying that Mr Forman would like to meet me. ‘Meet me?’ I said. ‘He wants to screen test every other actor in London, but he wants to MEET me? Well, I’m sure I’d love to MEET Mr Forman. I’m sure he’s a very interesting man.’ And in this captious spirit, I made off for the Connaught Hotel.

  When I got to Forman’s suite my worst fears were confirmed. The room seemed to contain every actor under the age of thirty who had had a good review in the last ten years. We stared at each other balefully. Then Richard Griffiths arrived – surely not to play Mozart, one thought. We got chatting. After a few minutes, the door flew open and everyone’s idea of a Hollywood director strode in, chewing a very large cigar and bellowing in an unfathomable Central European accent. He flung his arms round some of Richard Griffiths.

  Richard introduced me: ‘Milos, do you know Simon Callow?’ He sprang back. ‘Ah! YOU are Simon Callow. I wanted to look at you. Come in, come in,’ and ushered Richard and me into another room, which also contained Saul Zaentz, the producer, looking like a superannuated Santa Claus from Macy’s. We made small talk for a minute or two, but this is not Milos’s forte, and his eyes began to wander. The trickle of anecdotes ran dry.

  He said to me, ‘I want to tell you something. I have seen ten Mozarts, and you were by far the best. Everyone else was either great at being an asshole or great at being a genius. You are the only one who combined the two. Yes, a really fantastic performance. Brilliant. No, really, great.’ He tailed off, deep in thought.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, his brows furrowed, ‘What could you play in our film?’ He then started to search the cast list. Up and down the list his eyes went, but nothing seemed to suggest itself to him. ‘What?’ he asked me. ‘I really can’t imagine,’ I replied. ‘What kind of actor are you looking for?’ ‘A little one,’ he said, ‘like a bird –’ he vividly impersonated a bird – ‘and also a brilliant actor. Tell me,’ he looked at me accusingly, ‘where will I find such an actor?’ ‘I – I don’t know,’ I apologised. He grunted. He looked again at the cast list. ‘Well, we must think of something for you to do. I shall think about it.’

  Two days later I was lunching at
the Tate Gallery when the waitress came to my table and said, ‘You’re to phone a Mr Forman at the Connaught Hotel.’ To my great surprise, the telephone was answered by Forman himself.

  ‘I was a fool,’ the bass-baritone growl admitted. ‘Of course I shall test you for Mozart.’ Accordingly, a day or two later I found myself in a studio being directed for the first time by Milos. He was incisive, concentrated, sparing of words. He demonstrated what he wanted by acting out the emotion in question in a style that would not have surprised the audience at a Kabuki play but which was rather alarming at close quarters. ‘Mozart is happy,’ he would say, showing what the word meant by manipulating his mouth into a grin that extended to the corner of his eyes, which were themselves gleaming with maniacal delight. ‘You see? Netcheral.’

  I heard nothing. One day, it was discovered that the part of Mozart had indeed been cast, but there was interest in my playing something else in the film ‘Schumacher? Schickelbart?’ ‘Schikaneder,’ I prompted. ‘Yes, yes, Schikaneder.’ Who on earth is he? my agent wanted to know. Was he in the play?

  I knew all about the wonderfully ripe Schikaneder, librettist of The Magic Flute, the first Papageno, the leading actor-manager of his day, and the first man to play Hamlet in German. He had ended up in a lunatic asylum having provided the Viennese public with increasingly surreal and incoherent entertainments, a kind of Marx Brothers mayhem avant la lettre. But the role in the film was slender. More important, could I bear to watch some unknown Yank becoming world famous in my part? Anyway nothing apparently came of it. Until suddenly, and as always, panic. ‘They do want you for Schillerkrantz, darling, and you have to go to Abbey Road Studios on Friday to record a couple of arias and a duet with the Academy of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Marriner.’

  ‘But I’ve not agreed to play the part. And there’s singing. I daren’t even sing in my bath, let alone in front of Neville bloody Marriner. Just tell them thank you very much, but no thanks.’ Which she did. The effect was most gratifying. When I reached home, four messages had been left on my answering machine — one from Peter Shaffer, one from Saul Zaentz, and two from Milos Forman. I called them, the latter first, and was again amazed to get straight through to the man himself. Normally in the film world, anybody important is screened by layer upon layer of sidekicks. ‘I’m delighted you’re doing the movie,’ he said. ‘I understand there’s some problem with the singing, don’t worry, don’t worry, if necessary we’ll dub it. Of course, it would be nice if you could but don’t worry’ ‘Oh, okay,’ I said, ‘fine.’ Apparently every thing was settled. Not so. ‘We’d better meet to make sure we feel the same way about the part. Then we can go ahead.’

  Back to the dear old Connaught. The door was opened by Milos himself, all alone, again strangely bereft of lieutenants. ‘Schikaneder!’ he cried, and I saw his point. Quite by chance, I had turned up wearing my usual winter costume: a sweeping black fedora, an ankle-length black overcoat, and a bright red carnation in my buttonhole. We sat down and read a couple of scenes. Any attempt at characterisation was stamped on. ‘No, no, simple, simple. Be netcheral!’ I felt I had a lot to contribute in terms of the psyche of the actor-manager. Milos was having none of it. ‘It’s you! I want you.’

  Nevertheless, he cast me. ‘Very good, very good. Perfect. Only one problem: can you ride whores? ‘Good God,’ I thought, ‘he’s auditioning my sexuality.’ ‘Whores?’ I said weakly. ‘Yes, whores, whores, clip-clop, clip-clop…’ ‘Oh, horse, yes, yes, of course, I mean, no, but I can learn easily.’ ‘Very good. See you next week. And remember – NO ACTING. I wish I could change the name of the character to Simon Callows.’

  Things were looking up. The latest version of the script contained a much augmented role for Schikaneder, and I finally discovered that Mozart was to be Tom Hulce, whom I’d met in New York two years before – delightful, funny, and good – one of the Alan Strangs in the Broadway production of Equus, so we had John Dexter in common. We re-met at Abbey Road, and from that moment, I never experienced the slightest pang.

  We began, as usual with Milos, in medias res. Singing arias was bad enough but there was a scene (Mozart, Schikaneder and three of his actresses standing round the piano improvising tunes from The Magic Flute) which could only be a nightmare. So of course we started with that. Milos gave a vivid impression of how he imagined the scene: wild anarchy, raspberries blown and belches belched, Schikaneder, thumping the keyboard, Mozart, giggling insanely – and all within the framework of tunes being played, tossed around, transformed, stood on their head. ‘Okay?’ said Milos, and went, taking Shaffer with him.

  Eventually we did concoct something which satisfied him. Of its nature, though, it was almost impossible to repeat; and sustaining that level of crazy ebullience for a sound recording is a desperate task. ‘I know,’ said Shaffer, and disappeared, returning a minute later with two bottles of champagne. So it came about that the rather surprised walls of Studio One, Abbey Road, where some of the great classical recordings of the century had been made, witnessed a performance of certain tunes of Mozart by a gaggle of drunken actors shrieking and farting and hitting a priceless instrument.

  My aria was another matter. ‘It’s a shame,’ I said to Milos, ‘and I’m very sorry, but if I don’t have to worry about the singing it’ll be better for my acting.’ ‘Acting?’ Milos’s eyes narrowed. ‘Acting? There will be NO ACTING in my film.’ ‘But, Milos,’ I said, ‘he’s on a stage, in a theatre, acting.’ A dark and terrible pause. ‘Yes. Okay.’ Another pause. ‘But this will be the only acting in my film!’

  A month later, I was in Prague, to rehearse all my scenes in one day. Tom and Meg Tilly (Constanze) had tottered off their planes, having been on them for sixteen hours. The set was built, and the moment we all arrived, Milos plunged in. He said nothing about the scenes, simply gave us our physical movements, and then told us to start. Within seconds, he would be on his feet, protesting. ‘No, no, no, no. Simple. Please. Not like this –’ a not entirely complimentary impersonation of one’s physical and vocal attributes ensued – ‘like this –’ a cartoon of the desired performance was now indicated, with many a grimace and grunt.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Tom. ‘We are graduates of the John Dexter school of acting. Nothing this man says can harm us.’ I was wrong. ‘No, no, no, no, NO!’ he would cry, time and again. It was as if he couldn’t believe the perversity of what we were presenting to him. How could we not be playing the scene the way he had envisaged it? Faced with the offensive performance, his technique was to destroy it by brute force. As far as one could judge, it was nothing personal: simply that this piece of wrong acting had to be expunged from the world. With mad energy Milos would assault it, raining insults, parodistic impersonations, reproaches upon its head, until, inevitably, it succumbed.

  Basically, netcheralness was the goal; but Milos’s definition of what was netcheral was quite arbitrary. What it amounted to was that the way Milos saw it was netcheral — any other way, not. Moreover, ‘Remember that I have a camera here and this light is here so it would help me very much if you will keep your head low here and turn only thirty degrees this way.’ Netcheral was a relative term, and one that became irksome. We found an antidote. During the interminable hours of piano practice I endured in order to play a twenty-second fragment for a scene, I remembered that in Germany the note B natural is called H. Thus whenever Milos would cry, ‘Be natural!’ I would murmur, ‘H.’ This was oddly consoling.

  Over supper that night, Milos further expounded his theories of film technique. ‘Stage actors are wonderful, big, generous. But they can’t use film, always acting, always doing something. On film, you must BE. And you must be yourself, I cast you to be you. Otherwise I cast someone else.’ ‘But Milos,’ said a slightly uneasy Murray Abraham, playing Salieri, ‘if you cast everyone to be themselves, well, Salieri’s a very nasty man.’ Milos stared at him for a long time. ‘Murray,’ he said, ‘you think too much.’

  Over t
he next six months I took fifty-seven planes in and out of Czechoslovakia, staying at the Panorama Hotel (the panorama being like a building site in Luton) and working at the urine-infested Barrandov Studios. There, where Milos had begun his career, he was the absolute centre of operations, exerting his massive concentration on the whole huge team. The shot would be set up without him, he would emerge from his room, and the scene would proceed.

  If the shot was good, ‘Very good, very good, very good,’ he would say, and withdraw back to his room to sleep while the next shot was set up. If not – if not, he would descend like the cavalry to root out imperfection. Sarcasm was the principal weapon. ‘Not bad, not bad. In your speech there were two or three lines where you sounded almost like a human being. This is very good, I like this.’

  His preferred method of demonstration would sometimes conflict with what he was saying. ‘You come into the room, you open the door, you say “HELLO!!!!” lightly, like that.’ Praise was implied rather than stated, but, when it came, the sun certainly shone. One day, after rushes, he said to me, ‘What we shot with you yesterday was wonderful, strong, true, netcheral,’ then added, quite without malice, almost as if to himself, ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it was.’

  The scene he was speaking about had been achieved only by dint of violent explosions and uncomprehending abuse – not really at me, but at the inexplicably wrong things I was doing – things I had no way of knowing about, because he hadn’t explained them to me. Why should he? he must have thought. They were so obvious.