by Simon Callow
But New York was even more resistant than London to the experience of having its eyes turned into its very soul. The play lasted three weeks at the Lyceum Theatre; after which the producer took it to Chicago, where Laughton could examine at first hand the place he had done so much to immortalise in the London theatre. (In fact, the city of Chicago had banned On the Spot as a scandalous calumny). Prohibition was at its last gasp, but both Chicago and New York remained awash with bath-tub gin. The Laughtons appear to have been somewhat alarmed by the scale and speed of things – America was still a mythic and improbable place for most English people, a kind of historical and anthropological no man’s land, peopled by hillbillies, scalp-happy Sioux and Italian mobsters. Social graces as practised in Shaftesbury Avenue (or even the Pavilion Hotel in Scarborough) seemed unknown. Elsa and Charles both, she from her radical and Bohemian background, he from his tradesman and High Art perspective, hated cant and snobbery; but they didn’t yet know how to handle the hail-fellow-well-met directness of the greatest democracy on Earth. Some years later, Laughton wrote, in his commentary to The Fabulous Country, the book he edited which is in effect a love letter to his adopted land, ‘I asked a policeman the way to the Empire Theatre and he said, “Can’t you read?” And I was humiliated. I only thought, years later, that I must have been using a “My good man” sort of voice, and he, as a proper American, was not having any of that, and he slapped me down.’ But he knew there was something about the place that answered a deep need in him: ‘the driver asked us where we wanted to go. We told him “The Chatham Hotel”. And the driver, who must have had a hell of a day, said: “There are too many different places.” We laughed, because we knew we were free to say the same kind of thing too.’
Laughton belonged to that generation of Englishmen to whom the nature of English social existence in the twenties and thirties was essentially false – pompous and restrictive. Sex had something to do with it – but language, customs, rubric were even more oppressive. ‘I was the guest of the Savage Club in London, and Sir Austin Chamberlain made a speech. I was sitting next to Nelson Doubleday the publisher. Sir Austin was polite and imperturbable. At the end of the speech Nelson Doubleday said to me, ‘Charlie, however thin you cut it, it’s still baloney,’ and I suddenly wanted to get on a boat and get back to New York so bad I could taste it.’
Auden or Isherwood might have said the very same thing.
During this first American visit, Laughton discovered another New World speciality: hype. His notices ensured an ever-ringing phone, and queues of producers at his door. They blandished him extravagantly with promises of huge sums of money and starring roles. What they never did was specify which roles. The blind slavery of a studio contract was clearly not for Laughton, however well paid. So he kept refusing.
Meanwhile, he and Elsa had met Ruth Gordon, who remained a friend for the rest of Charles’ life. She introduced them to her boyfriend, the vulpine Jed Harris, already – at thirty – a fully-fledged monster: ‘The Wonder Boy,’ ‘The Meteor’, ‘the man who invented Broadway.’ There was no doubting his technical skill as a director: it was his personal qualities that were in question. Enough, perhaps, to observe that Laurence Olivier’s performance of Richard III was closely modelled on him. A little of the charm of that famous interpretation belonged to Harris as well, though, because he persuaded Charles to repeat his Hercule Poirot in Alibi under his direction. The understanding was that Charles would be left to get on with the acting, while Jed dealt with the physical production. But this was not Jed’s way, and immediately rehearsals began, violent disagreements broke out. The play was brilliantly reviewed, and Charles again acclaimed, but it managed no more than forty performances. The American retitling of the play – Fatal Alibi – proved apt.
Jed Harris was Laughton’s first brush with the director-bully. His subsequent career was characterised by increasingly bitter and bloody engagements with this type. For the present, he was young enough and perhaps uncertain enough merely to resist. In time, his response to bullying became ingenious, comprehensive, and in one famous case, conclusive.
Everything in his temperament and his understanding of the art of acting rebelled against dragooning. He approached each role that he played as part of the whole. He had certainly thought as much about the work in question as the director, and he was not prepared simply to slot into some master-plan. Moreover, he was engaged in a very demanding activity: trying to animate unused parts of himself, to give fresh and original life to something existing only in the author’s imagination and on a piece of paper. The most distinguished and successful theatre practitioners in England – Edgar Wallace, Komisarjevsky, Gerald du Maurier – had given him the time, the space and the trust in which to exercise his art. It is extraordinary that a certain species of director – Jed Harris was just the first – having recognised his talent and sought to work with him, should then deny his need of the quite normal conditions he required in which to function. Laughton must have felt particularly depressed by contrast with his previous experience in the play, working with his idol, du Maurier.
His depression came out in the form of bearishness towards Elsa, now unemployed again. She took refuge in innocent friendship with the stage manager of Payment Deferred: Joe Losey. Together they visited exotic dives, searching out louche novelty. They roamed Harlem in the small hours, hearing jazz, dancing, giving in to it all. Charles was nervous, and preferred to stay at home, brooding and angry.
Elsa went back to England.
As soon as Fatal Alibi dribbled to an end, Charles followed. There’s really nothing more displeasing than to have received remarkable notices and then fail to sell tickets. It’s like throwing a wonderful party to which no one turns up. Better, far better, an out and out flop. Neither the notices nor the kind words of those who do struggle along can comfort you. At some deep level, there is terrible rejection. Even with these notices, people don’t want to see you. If you were giving away money in the street, they probably wouldn’t take it.
As it happens, many of the audience during those two short runs were actors, and Laughton’s performances blazed themselves into their memories. It was a completely new kind of acting. The combination of intense physical projection and deep emotional realism was potent in itself; but when the medium for all this expressiveness was a plump, rubbery-faced character man of medium height, the impression was indelible. Vincent Price called it super-realism. Whatever it was, it made Laughton, as he had been in London, a hero to the younger generation. Already they were flattering him with proverbial sincerity: he was starting to become one of the most imitated actors of his time.
Literally as the boat pulled out of New York harbour, a telegram arrived from Jesse Lasky at Paramount, offering a new kind of contract: a three-year, two-film-a-year contract with the right to choose his roles. By the time he’d arrived in England, he’d found out that the first film being offered had been written by his old friend Benn Levy, adaptor of A Man with Red Hair, and now in Hollywood. An anxious telegram to Benn Levy elicited the assurance that even if he, Levy, were to play the role, he couldn’t fail. Elsa and Charles, under a continuing bombardment of wires from Paramount, packed their bags and set sail for America. Their experience of New York and Chicago would scarcely have prepared them for Hollywood, which in almost every way, culturally, physically, socially, was (and is) another world from the East Coast.
Climatically, they can have had little to complain of, but the curious eccentricity of the architecture (‘late marzipan’ they dubbed it) and the diffuseness of the city’s layout were daunting. The movie industry’s indifference to newcomers was much in evidence. Out here among the palm trees, on the beaches, on the golf-courses and by the swimming-pools, what this plump young actor did in New York signified little. Photographers snapped them, journalists interviewed them (or rather him), but in a politely baffled way, as if they were visiting Albanian royalty. What are you doing here? is the subtext of many a polite Hollywood enquiry.
Because, of course, after the hysteria of the courtship, the insistent demands to get over here!, he wasn’t needed immediately after all.
He used his time, not socialising, not seeking out the British community, the ‘Hollywood Raj’ of which Sheridan Morley writes so vividly, not lounging on the sand, but in learning.
Laughton’s experience of the processes of film-making up to that time was slight, and not particularly instructive. He’d been involved in a couple of shorts written for Elsa by H. G. Wells – very quirky little films dominated by her droll-bizarre persona. Charles walks, or rather, runs on in one as a gangster; in another he impersonates a Rajah. In 1931, while appearing in Payment Deferred, he’d made three films – Wolves, Comets and Down River, ‘quota quickies’ (to make up the quota of British movies required by Act of Parliament) – which are generally described as best-forgotten. There is, anyway, no choice, as they have disappeared from the face of the earth. Kine Weekly of May 1931, dismissing Down River as ‘school-boy stuff’ tells us that Laughton, playing a half-Dutch, half-Oriental skipper of a tramp being watched for drug-trafficking, is, understandably, ‘never too sure of his accent. He has an opportunity to display his genius for make-up but fails to draw a convincing character.’ Wolves was devastatingly summed up by the New York Times: ‘A pack of human wolves held at bay by one of their number in whom there still glows a faint spark of chivalry while a fear-maddened woman flees a lonely Labrador outdoor camp in an open boat through an icy-fingered blizzard – these are the elements of Wanted Men (re-titled for America), the searing, action-crammed thirty-seven minute all-talking melodrama.’ It took seven years for it to reach America: ‘its self-sacrificing hero is none other than Charles Laughton, and the performance will set you to contemplating the marvels that have been wrought in him in these seven years.’ Its other star, Jack Osterman, according to the review, ‘when he heard a print had been unearthed, started saving up with the idea of perhaps buying it and making a bonfire of it.’ As for Comets, it too seems to have disappeared, which is a great shame, because it contained among various other variety acts strung together in revue format, a performance by Charles and Elsa of their 1928 hit from Riverside Nights, Frankie and Johnny. This is the only known instance on celluloid of them singing together, though there is a poignant pirate recording of him grunting and her trilling through Baby It’s Cold Outside from the 40’s. Shortly after its first release, Comets was re-released without Frankie and Johnny which did have a further lease of life as a short, only shown in America. There is no trace of this, either, however, so we must assume it well and truly lost.
His only other pre-Hollywood film is in a rather different category: Piccadilly, 1929, directed by Ewald A. Dupont, the fitfully brilliant maker of the U.F.A. masterpiece, Variété. A silent film, written by Arnold Bennett, its central characters are played by Anna May Wong and Gilda Gray. Charles appears in only one scene, in which he plays a tetchy diner, only pausing from cramming food into his mouth to complain. It is the first of many magnificent eating scenes Laughton was to commit to celluloid, and it bears comparison with any of them. It is a most compelling vision of greed; gross, but also Grosz, a pig in a starched collar. Whether the distinguished German director influenced Laughton towards it is impossible to say, but the performance would not be out of place in a number of U.F.A. films of the period.
Apart from these, Laughton was a stranger to the studio. His enforced wait was spent exploring the possibilities. A studio, even more than a theatre, is like a feudal village, a network of craftsmen, labouring away for the great Lord, the director. Hollywood had bought the best talent in every department, just as it had bought him. As he passed through their various hands, the wigmakers, the costumiers, the sound operators, preparing for his screen tests, he started to make the mental adjustment necessary to the new medium.
It was a medium to appeal to him in many ways. Perfectionist that he was, he was always doomed to frustration in the theatre. Physical limitations, of space, facilities and himself, compromised his achievement. He was deeply interested in, and disappointed by, the realisation of detail in the theatre: the cut of a costume, the join of a wig. Film offered completely new possibilities of physical freedom and quality of craftsmanship. As far as he was concerned, it offered him two golden advantages that he exploited to greater effect than any actor in the history of the cinema: the close-up; and the re-take. The close-up enabled him to explore even further the nature of his special gift, perceptively identified by John Mason Brown: the art of making thought flesh. ‘Movie acting is simple,’ Laughton later said to Marius Goring (only a year later, in fact, flushed with his discovery of the new medium). ‘Feel it in your guts, and then let it dribble up through your eyes’. That plump mask might have been expressly designed to be framed by a cinema screen. ‘I’m certainly lucky,’ he told Picturegoer in 1935. ‘Imagine a face like mine photographing so well. My features cut through the screen like a knife through cheese. It’s sheer good luck – but who would have believed it?’
His shameless exploitation of the right to re-take became a joke in the industry: a rather expensive joke in some cases. In the theatre where time is limited by the need to get the whole play more or less right by opening night, a compromised result has often to be accepted, often for the good of all. The chance to re-take offered by movies is a perfectionist’s heaven – and hell: to an actor of Laughton’s fertility, it is tantamount to a recipe for madness. His acting faculty was a thing constructed of a million nerves, a-quiver with impulses. Every impulse, as it passed through him, provoked an adjacent impulse: an entire new set of vibrations was sounded, each with implications. So easy to become lost in a baroque tissue of resonating tendrils. But it is exactly this ability to form a character out of a thousand living cells which together form a breathing, complex organism that fitted him so wonderfully for the screen with its microscopic sensitivity. Watching him can be like watching film of plant life: nature’s kingdom in a man. The linearity which makes Laurence Olivier for the most part such a disappointing film actor, but so exhilarating to see on stage, is entirely absent from Charles Laughton, as an actor and as a man. There are no straight lines with him: everything is composed of a myriad of tiny arrows, each pointing in a different direction. Hence the illusion of life itself.
The Benn Levy script, The Devil and the Deep, was delayed, so Laughton was ‘lent’ by Paramount to another studio – Universal – for his first Hollywood movie, another Levy script, and barely American at all. The story was by J. B. Priestley, most of the cast were English, and when they weren’t – like Raymond Massey and Melvyn Douglas – they spoke with English accents; the setting was as English as the fog in which the eponymous house is enveloped. The film was directed by James Whale, fresh from triumphs with Journey’s End and Frankenstein, but before that an associate of the Laughtons in various capacities: stage manager of Riverside Nights, habitué of the Cave of Harmony, and portrayer of Crispin’s epicene son Herrick in A Man with Red Hair. It was with him that they dined on their first night in Los Angeles. ‘You’ll love it here,’ he told Charles. ‘I’m pouring the gold through my hair and enjoying every moment of it!’ With their not dissimilar Northern English backgrounds, Laughton and Whale had radically different tastes. Laughton embraced High Art, Whale High Camp, in which style The Old Dark House is the uncontested masterpiece. It is an uncharacterisic début for Laughton: usually florider by far than any of his fellow-actors, in this film, he is virtually the straight man – not by any restraint on his part; far from it – he is splendidly full-blooded as a class-conscious Yorkshire businessman. Simply that never before or since has a director assembled such a cast of living gargoyles: Ernest Thesiger, with his air of a scandalised vampire; Boris Karloff, monumentally inarticulate; Eva Moore as Thesiger’s sister, deaf and scowling; Elspeth Dudgeon as Thesiger’s 102-year-old father. That Laughton makes any impact at all in his straightforward role is a remarkable achievement. Priestley had written the
piece as an experiment in endowing the horror-story with ‘overtones of psychological symbolism’. Laughton humanizes the conventional character, refusing to allow either writer or director to manipulate him. His bluff gaucheness at what must certainly be the most awful dinner party in the history of movies (waited on by Karloff, presided over by Thesiger, offering potatoes as if they were lice, and dominated by Eva Moore, cramming food down her gullet in fistfuls) is properly funny; but what marks the performance as distinctively his is his pointing up of something he always went after in a part: the plight of the underdog – in this case, as again, so often, the social and the sexual underdog.
The speech in which he describes his loathing for the bosses whose sneering drove his wife to suicide, and him to becoming a capitalist himself in revenge, is full of real feeling, the more remarkable because he allows it to emerge from his bluffness, and then to disappear back into it. Another actor might have sought to explain the character in terms of his bitterness; not Laughton. He simply states it: there is this, and there is this. You add it up.
Another original colour that he contributes is in the scene where his mistress, the good-time girl Gladys duCane tells him – rather unexpectedly, it must be said, in the development of the narrative – that she’s going to desert him for the Melvyn Douglas character. He receives the news firstly with anger, then resignation, then – the Laughton touch – an odd, bashful tenderness: an affectionate forgiveness, which, in the prevailing preposterous context, is touching.
Laughton had no very warm feelings for any of the cast (though of course he had previously been directed by, and was later himself to direct, Raymond Massey). He never cared for Karloff; as for Thesiger … Elsa Lanchester describes a dinner-party she gave in Hollywood which sounds not much less awkward than that in the film. Rogers, the chauffeur-cook, had made and served the meal. When he brought in the main course, lamb, Thesiger spotted the slightly green apples accompanying it, and pointed at them. ‘Arsenic apples!’ he cried.