by Simon Callow
This is the heart of the matter. Laughton delighted Brecht by two different answers to the question why he acted. One, quoted by Eric Bentley in his Brecht Memoir, was: ‘Because I like to imitate great men.’ It is the word ‘imitate’ that so pleased Brecht: an imitation is always a critique, a comment on the original. Laughton might have said: I like to become great men; or I like to forget myself by becoming great men. His choice of word was precise and intentioned. The other reply was the one Brecht made famous in his magnificent Building Up A Part: Laughton’s Galileo: ‘Because people don’t know what they’re like and I think I can show them.’ Brecht goes on to say ‘he had all sorts of ideas which were begging to be disseminated about how people really live together.’ That is no doubt true and no doubt Laughton did feel that he knew what people were like. That is not why he proved such a perfect vehicle for the Brechtian approach. His instinctive grasp of it stems from his relationship to himself, his critical account of himself. He was profoundly ill-at-ease in society, in his profession, even, perhaps especially, in his own body. He didn’t like himself, felt himself to be wrong, odd, unlovely. This is common with actors. The usual method, however, is to change oneself into someone one does like and display that (star acting), or keep escaping into different characters, and thus elude oneself. Laughton does something different. He knows what he’s like, and he painstakingly displays it. He doesn’t ask us to identify with it, because he doesn’t identify with it: he is the subject of his own demonstration. His performances never console nor do they sedate: we are moved by the naked truth of them, and by the courage and self-expenditure of the man giving them. In the best of them we are moved, like Brecht’s ideal audience, to cry out: ‘These things should not be allowed!’ His. attitude to what he is demonstrating is personal and often painful; the demonstration is passionate, passionate from a lifetime of observation and struggle. As it happens, his attitude, his stance, his viewpoint were not the same as Brecht’s – ‘in political matters he was indifferent (indeed, timid)’ – but the all-important thing as far as Brecht was concerned was that he didn’t want to drug the audience (as in the ‘culinary theatre’ he abhorred); he urgently wanted to tell them something they might not know.
Not to prove but to demonstrate; not to explain but to state the thing that needs to be explained; not to tie up the ends, but to expose the contradictions. This, as Brecht was at pains to indicate, meant no loss of warmth of emotion or reality, indeed, the more, the better: the thing being shown must be real. And the fact that he greatly admired Laughton’s acting is a guarantee that he wasn’t interested in anything dry or cerebral: flesh and blood, alive and real, was what he was after: but capable of change. Brecht was distrustful when ‘there is a complete fusion of the actor with his rôle that makes the character seem so natural, so impossible to conceive any other way.’ Laughton never suggested that; though he did draw short of any political solution. ‘We must find means of ‘shedding light on’ the human being at that point where he seems capable of being changed by society’s intervention.’ There the collaborators parted company. Laughton might have felt, with Kierkegaard, that ‘an artist cannot change society; all that he can do is to express that it is sick.’
The course of their relationship is charted in Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, his work diary. Shortly after they met, Brecht showed Laughton one of his innumerable unperformed plays, Schweyk in the Second World War. Laughton fell for it, was ‘really enthusiastic.’ He read it out loud to Brecht, Eisler and Hans Winge. ‘We laughed uproariously. He understood all the jokes.’ The thought of Laughton in that particular part is mouth-watering. His grasp of the indestructible Bohemian would have been absolute. ‘He got all the jokes.’ Reading out loud, already a familiar mode of communication for Laughton, became central to his relationship with Brecht. ‘L. reads to us from Measure for Measure and The Tempest. He reclines on a white couch before a magnificent grandfather clock in Bavarian baroque, his legs crossed, so that his Buddha-like tummy is openly visible and reads out a short piece from a small book, partly like a scholar, partly like an actor, laughing at the jokes, occasionally apologising for not knowing lines … he reads the part of Caliban with feeling.’ On that occasion Laughton talked to them about how badly actors are treated in England: apparently his Bond Street tailor only agreed to make his suits if he kept it secret, otherwise he would lose his Tory customers. ‘You get no respect here,’ he said, ‘but you get money. Where else can an actor live like this?’ – pointing at the antique furniture, the park with lawn, and the Mexican heads of Medusa.
Barely three months later, in August 1944, as if to mock him, a large piece of his lawn slithered away into the ocean. Laughton immediately succumbed to apocalyptic intimations: it will be all over the papers, he’ll be a laughing stock, it’ll damage his career. He told Brecht that he was widely regarded as a ham, and feared not being able to make enough money, that he was old (45, in fact). Brecht in his journal observes that he looks old. As a sort of consolation prize, he showed Laughton the poem he had written for him: ‘Garden in progress’, a celebration of the flowers and statues so lovingly installed by the actor. It was at once his greatest comfort and the most direct outlet for his creativity – every plant had been chosen personally by him, carefully placed, and expertly bedded. The Mexican and pre-Columbian statues (Laughton was among the first serious collectors of these) were likewise positioned with infinite care. All this Brecht saw and celebrated in a poem of exceptional charm and perceptiveness:
Wherever one went, if one looked
One found living projects hidden
He told Laughton: ‘Your garden will be a myth based on a legend.’ In view of the calamity, he appended a last verse which completes and extends the images of the poem:
Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast
Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides
Drag parts of it into the depths without warning. Seemingly
There is not much time left in which to complete it.
Laughton could hardly have failed to cheer up on receipt of the lovely Horatian poem; but it was only the first part of Brecht’s consolation: the second was the play The Life of Galileo, which Brecht now showed him for the first time. He had written it in 1938 at the suggestion of his collaborator, Ferdinand Reyher. Initially it was to be a film-script, but it quickly turned into a play, which Brecht provisionally entitled The Earth Moves; by the time he completed it, in 1938, in Denmark, it had acquired the present title. Brecht and Reyher had high hopes of an American production of it; in a sense it was always destined for Broadway, though in fact the first performance of this version took place in Zurich, in 1943. As early as 1942, though, Brecht had tried to interest his friend Oscar Homolka, now established in Hollywood, in playing Galileo, suggesting that he had written the part with him in mind; nothing happened.
By contrast, the moment he read it, Laughton knew he must do it; the rôle, the play, the subject all demanded it. But perhaps the most alluring prospect was that of active participation in the writing of the play itself. His sense of language was acute, but his own use of it dismayed him. ‘I just can’t get myself down on paper,’ he writes to a friend; ‘I just can’t put two words together on paper,’ he writes to Elsa Lanchester. In almost every one of the few letters he wrote, he says ‘Jesus, what a stinking letter I write,’ or ‘What a bloody awful letter I write. It reads simply bloodily.’ But perhaps in collaboration …
He spoke no German, and first read the play in Elisabeth Hauptmann’s literal rendition. A version of the play was then commissioned from two young MGM writers of Laughton’s acquaintance, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker; it was evidently satisfactory as far as it went, but he and Brecht decided that they should make a new version. In late 1944, they started the unique process of play-making which resulted in a radically new version of the play, and which dominated both their lives for nearly three years.
Brecht was always perfectly happy to share his a
uthorial activities with others; his confidence, again, spared him any anxiety about his creative potency. Any useful input was accepted and absorbed. The relationship with Laughton was evidently entirely congenial to him, all the more for its unusual form. Because Laughton spoke no German, it was necessary for Brecht to offer a rudimentary translation of each line, which Laughton would then convert into idiomatic English. Brecht would then re-work that to further precision, and Laughton would make final adjustments. ‘This system of performance-and-repetition had one immense advantage in that psychological discussions were entirely avoided’ – anathema to both. Laughton was, however, deeply concerned with the shaping of the scenes, the making of points, the overall impact of the play; and many of his suggestions were incorporated into the text. Together they conducted what would now be called a workshop: Laughton would bring in scenes from other plays so as to learn from them – especially Elizabethan ones (‘Although L.’s theatrical experience had been in a London which had become thoroughly indifferent to the theatre, the old Elizabethan London still lived in him, a London where theatre was such a passion it could swallow immortal works of art greedily and barefaced as so many texts’). They shared a passion for the mechanics of playwriting: how is this effect achieved, what is the best way to handle such and such a relationship? Both were learning, both were teaching. They’d rush off to the museums and the art galleries for clues. Laughton amassed a collection of sometimes no more than tangentially relevant material – ‘I could see L. would only make marginal use of it’ – in order to discover the world of the play and its embodiment: ‘he obstinately sought for the external: not for physics but for the physicists’ behaviour.’ ‘For quite a while, our work embraced everything we could lay our hands on.’
As Brecht paints it, it was something of an idyll for both of them. ‘We used to work in L.’s small library, in the mornings. But often L. would come and meet me in the garden, running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass, and would show me some changes in his flower beds, for the garden always occupied him, providing many problems and subleties. The gaiety and proportion of this world of flowers overlapped in the most pleasant way into our work.’ It was a kind of love affair, for Brecht an extension of other similar collaborations, for Laughton the discovery of a new and wonderful world. At last he knew what he had been preparing himself for, all these years of reading and studying and looking and learning. Somehow it had needed association with another mind, one he deeply respected, to give him courage to create something. ‘I have many times tried to write very simple stories, but they all looked and sounded terrible the next morning,’ he wrote, years later; and Elsa Lanchester wrote that ‘Charles was never a creative playwright, but he was a master cutter. He would have liked to have been a writer, because in fact he really knew how to build a dramatic house. And Brecht spotted that. Beyond acting, Charles’ chief talent, I think, was construction. You might call it editing.’
For Brecht it was simply a treat to have the total engagement of this huge and complicated spirit whose commitment to the play, and to Brecht himself, was unqualified. No doubt with the constant overview of wanting to get the thing on, this touchiest of men was astonishingly compliant; moreover there was a sense in which, despite Laughton’s political ‘indifference’, his suggestions, both for cuts and additions, sharpened the play’s political impact ‘on the simple grounds that passages in question seemed ‘somehow weak’ to him, by which he meant that they do not do justice to things as they are.’ Willett and Manheim in their critical edition examine in detail the changes made from the 1938 original text. The most significant with which Laughton was involved were, to take two examples, quite specifically political: it was he who urged Brecht to make Lodovico, Virginia’s fiancé, into a nobleman; and it was his idea to have a dummy of the Pope thrown in the air by the crowd in the carnival scene. Laughton had obviously entered into the mind of author: ‘driven by his theatrical instincts, L. is fervently expounding the political aspects.’ His greatest influence, of course, was in the area of the character of Galileo. Interestingly, his suggestions to Brecht were all to do with rendering the character more culpable: ‘L. is for throwing the character to the wolves … he insists on a complete portrayal of depravity, stemming from the crime that brought out Galileo’s negative side. Only Galileo’s brilliant mind survives, functioning in a void, found redundant by its owner, who now desires mediocrity.’
Laughton’s identification with not merely the outward characteristics of Galileo – his sensuality, his passion for learning, his cunning – but also with his moral situation gave his work on the play particular intensity. His nameless, undefined guilt immediately homed in on the matter of Galileo’s treachery, his betrayal of science, of the people. Brecht reports: ‘he reveals this idea most clearly when he is called a ‘scab’ for crossing a picket line in front of the studio; this hurt him deeply, no applause here.’
The film being picketed was Because of Him, one of the five films he made during the period of his collaboration with Brecht. Though mostly forgotten now, each of the films contains a rather refreshing performance from Laughton. It may not be fanciful to suggest that the work with Brecht, in restoring Laughton’s self-respect and stimulating every part of his creative faculties, did in fact somewhat restore his enthusiasm for acting itself. It was, of course, necessary for Laughton to keep breaking off from the work in order to make money. In an eloquent phrase Brecht compared Laughton’s lifestyle with that of his friend Peter Lorre: ‘like Laughton, he lives in shameful poverty with four houses and his own Japanese gardeners in a $50,000 villa.’ Laughton did indeed maintain a substantial establishment – though his principal expenditure was on the vast consolation of great art. He was beginning his collection of modern masters, and it wasn’t cheap. It is a measure of his new-found sense that life was, in Rimbaud’s famous phrase, ‘elsewhere.’ He was acting in order to surround himself with great art; to surround himself with it, rather than to create it. But now he could use the indifferent films he was offered to underwrite the Great Project: Galileo. So perhaps that too affected his general demeanour in the making of them.
Captain Kidd, the first of the five films, is generally regarded as a woeful demonstration of the depths to which Laughton had sunk. Certainly in point of production values, the picture, in common with so many at this period of his career, bears no comparison whatever with the films of his great period, the MGM and RKO films. There was neither time nor money to aim for the kind of finish and detail and intelligent shaping of script that had characterised those films. The producer on Captain Kidd, Benedict Bogeaus (better Bogeaus than Dull, no doubt), seems on the evidence of the drab costumes, fake interiors and palpably plastic ocean, to have confined himself to cutting corners. The director, Rowland V. Lee, veteran of costume action dramas, shoots without inspiration; while the script is a preposterous travesty of history and verisimilitude alike. There are a number of attractive performances, however. John Carradine is forceful, Gilbert Roland poses the dago threat to Barbara Britton’s Lady Anne with some flair and Randolph Scott does his usual poor man’s Gary Cooper routine with panache. Henry Daniell, Laughton’s mocking neighbour from The Suspect, without either lines or character, fails to make that elusive monarch William III live; but Reginald Owen, with whom Laughton had agreeably sparred in The Canterville Ghost, makes a brilliant foil to him here. Their scenes, valet and master, are the best thing in the film. It is tempting to believe that Laughton had a hand in the writing of them, because they so stand out from everything else. They are, for one thing, about something: class. Laughton’s Kidd aspires to social improvement and hires the valet to instil the appropriate behaviour into him. There is much dry correcting of vowels and adjusting of syntax and murmured sartorial advice, with Laughton torn between the desire to learn and the impulse to kill his mentor. ‘Pity about the hair,’ says Owen, surveying Kidd’s matted locks, ‘I suppose you’ve tried everything?’ Their first scene together has an
almost Brechtian quality to it, a demonstration of attitudes and behaviour with distant parallels in several of the plays, in which a character is re-made: Arturo Ui, Man Equals Man, and, indeed, Galileo (the Pope dressing scene).