by Simon Callow
Laughton’s billing was very firmly and very conspicuously below the title on the posters, in there with the supporting character players like Miss Barrymore and Charles Coburn. His salary was commensurately in decline; nevertheless, he was generous (or guilty?) enough to offer Brecht $5,000 dollars as compensation for the delay in producing Galileo. There was to be one more delay before rehearsals could start: Edward Hambleton had proposed the play to the Pelican Theatre Company, run by his friend Norman Lloyd, actor, producer and assistant director on Arch of Triumph, and his friend, John Houseman, whose association with Brecht went back, like Losey’s, to the mid-thirties and a plan to stage Round Heads and Pointed Heads. Lloyd and Houseman were rashly trying to establish a base for serious live theatre in Los Angeles. They embraced the idea of doing Galileo with great enthusiasm but judged it too difficult a play with which to open their first season. The play they chose to do this with was The Skin of Our Teeth, the Thornton Wilder extravaganza, and Galileo was scheduled for the end of May, to open on 1 July 1947. Laughton went away again to make another film, The Big Clock.
Laughton’s Earl Janoth, the newspaper proprietor who murders his mistress, is an adroit creation, witty and vivid. If in It Started with Eve he seems somehow to have foreshadowed the elderly Lord Stockton, in The Big Clock he appears to have anticipated Edward Heath, Broadstairs vowels, heaving shoulders and all. He plays the newspaper magnate as a Napoleon of print, master-minding his empire with an eagle eye for detail (‘there’s a bulb been burning for days in a cupboard on the fourth floor. Find out who’s responsible and dock his pay, will you?’) and an obsession with time – ‘I’ll give you six minutes to reconsider’. He’s both impassive and dynamic, tripping statistics off his tongue as he suddenly makes his staff jump with a single pointed observation; fastidiously fingering his lips as he dismisses unsatisfactory proposals for the increase of circulation (‘our aim is to sell magazines, not to pay our readers to read them’); gliding at top speed from room to room. The performance is a technical tour-de-force of high-speed throwaway, comic and powerful at the same time. The voice rarely rises in either pitch or volume – flick, flick, flick goes Janoth, even under extreme pressure. The scene of confrontation between Janoth and his mistress is the only eruption from Laughton, and even that is almost stylised: he plunges into a jealous reproach, puffing mechanically away at his cigarette, as she rounds on him, mocking his ugliness and undesirability (almost de rigueur in Laughton movies). His lip begins to twitch – only his lip, as if it had a life of its own. The camera witnesses this in extreme close-up. When the lip can twitch no more, Janoth picks up a heavy object and hurls it across the room, killing his mistress. He stands just as impassively over her, upon which the scene cuts to him quite impassively and drily confessing his crime to his assistant. Janoth has been demonstrated to us. We know nothing about how he feels, or why he is the way he is, but we know everything about what he is, and how he works – like a clock, as it happens, the image that dominates and unifies the whole film. Laughton seems to be drawing attention to the robotic heartlessness of big business. Without a trace of remorse or morality, he allows his guilt to be transferred in turn to not one but two other people; that’s how he functions. It’s a quite fascinating performance, ending with the unforgettable image of Janoth tumbling backwards down the lift-shaft as impassively as he has done everything else.
The film itself has been as unjustly neglected as Laughton’s performance. Directed by John Farrow, the reliable Australian director of any number of unremarkable films, it has a great elegance and flair in a style that might best be described as nearly noir – visually the film is dominated by the big clock itself, a massive tower within the Janoth building which would not seem out of place in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The play of shadows is handled in a masterly way; while the plot with its inversions and convolutions (Ray Milland as a crime detective spends much of the film trying to track himself down, as does Laughton) presents an image of nightmarish reversals. Milland, Maureen O’Sullivan (the director’s wife) and Henry Morgan as a psychopathic masseur are sharply focused. Elsa Lanchester provides rather un-comic relief as a whacky lady painter; for once, her work seems out of key with both Laughton and the film.
Richard Maybaum, the producer, reports a curious incident, a week before shooting began: Elsa and Charles appeared in his office at the studio with long faces. ‘Dear Mr Maybaum,’ said Elsa, ‘it’s so terribly sad, but we can’t be in your film.’ ‘Oh’ said Maybaum. ‘No,’ replied Lanchester. ‘You see, we don’t know who we are, and we never take anything on unless we know who we are.’ And they left. A few days later, they burst in on Maybaum, who had – wisely in the event – just decided to sit tight – to announce joyfully, ‘It’s alright! We know who we are!’ ‘And who,’ asked Maybaum, ‘are you?’ ‘Dorothy Parker and Colonel Macormack,’ Elsa replied. Maybaum accepted the news phlegmatically. Their performances in the film bear no resemblances to these prototypes, but obviously it made them happy. Or one of them, at least. Maybaum drily observes that Laughton said nothing whatever at either meeting, and he was never certain how seriously he took it. Interestingly, on this film Laughton’s fee – $100,000, a very decent whack – included Elsa’s fee, as clear an identification as could be imagined of the disparity in their respective standings. Even Charles, however, had been an unattractive casting proposition to the front office and was only finally given the rôle after every other possibility had been considered. When the film was released, he was held to be a liability in certain areas: in Nebraska, his name was actually taken off the marquee in deference to local disfavour.
Filming complete, Laughton returned, refreshed, to Galileo. Brecht and he continued last-minute revision on the play up to the very last minute – and beyond. (They were still revising when the play transferred to New York.) They spent hours in the libraries and museums looking above all for visual stimulation both for the characters and for the settings. They gave a young actor whom they were trying to interest in the part of Lodovico, for instance, a reproduction of the magnificent Bronzino Portrait of a Young Man, gazing coolly and almost insolently out of the canvas, his finger marking the place in the book he was reading. It is claimed that Brecht did not have a high degree of visual awareness but his perceptive account of, for example, the Brueghel Fall of Icarus (the same painting that inspired Auden’s ‘Musée Des Beaux-Arts’) seems to give that the lie:
‘Tiny scale of this legendary event (you have to hunt for the victim). The characters turn their back on the incident. Lovely picture of the concentration needed for ploughing … special beauty and gaiety of the landscape during the frightful event.’
Clearly Brecht felt that the painter’s technique was similar to his own; that is, a method of drawing the eye to what was important, to what was new. He puts it even more clearly in his comment on the same painter’s Flight of Charles the Bold:
‘The fleeing commander, his horse, his retinue and the landscape are all quite consciously painted in such a way as to create the impression of an abnormal event, and astonishing disaster. In spite of his inadequacy the painter succeeds brilliantly in bringing out the unexpected. Amazement guides his brush.’
Laughton too studied painting not merely sensuously but to learn, and to learn about his own art. He spoke feelingly about painting on many occasions, but one particular observation is worth repeating: ‘Figures should in fact be depicted in such a way that you want to change places with them.’ Both men looked to the visual for enlightenment. Brecht, in particular, relied on his designers, (above all Caspar Neher) to suggest stage pictures which expressed the crux of the scene, groupings, to which all the stage movement should lead. He and Laughton commissioned John Hubley, an ex-Disney animator and later close collaborator of Losey’s, to make sketches for each scene. It’s a concept of pre-planning the placing of a scene which is rarely practised in the modern theatre, where placing is held to ‘evolve’; but it’s an interesting measure of the degree
to which both Brecht and Laughton were concerned with the expressive impact of the staging: no question here of actors ‘just standing around’, taking up the most convenient position; on the contrary, the placing of the actors was gestic: a crystallised manifestation of the thing to be shown.
Brecht and Laughton also seem to have done the casting themselves: a few emigré actors, like Hugo Haas, as the Pope, quite a number of serious young Hollywood actors, acquaintances of Laughton (Frances Heflin, sister of Van, for example), but for the most part, in James Lyon’s phrase, ‘both Laughton and Brecht wanted unspoiled, teachable, younger people.’ Many of these they found in the recently defunct Actors’ Lab, including one, Bill Phipps, who, as it happens, became Laughton’s lover, a troubled but none the less sustaining relationship. He played Andrea, though Eric Bentley, for one, reckons he was overparted. In general, the company they assembled was young, eager and talented.
By mid-June when official rehearsals began, many of the cast had already done a great deal of unofficial and unpaid work – not that there was much money around for anyone. Laughton and Edward Hambleton had each stumped up $25,000 dollars: not peanuts, in 1947, but not a great deal, either, with a cast of nearly 40, innumerable scene changes, a band and a huge wardrobe requirement. Laughton and three other actors were on $40 a week, three more were on $20, and the rest on little or nothing. The 265-seat theatre could never have made enough money to pay for all that; this was a labour of love, in three cases above all: Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife, who, though one of the greatest actresses in the world, offered her services as wardrobe mistress; Ruth Berlau, Brecht’s current mistress, who took the many production photographs (which still survive, giving a clear indication of what the play must have looked like); and Laughton himself, suddenly very nervous at the prospect of actually doing the thing he had dreamed of for three years.
Rehearsals were dominated by Brecht. His rage was famous and terrible, but seems to have been reserved for the technical aspects of the production. Houseman observes: ‘his attitude was consistently objectionable and outrageous … he was harsh, intolerant and, often, brutal and abusive. The words scheiss and shit were foremost in his vocabulary … that he was almost always right in his judgements did not diminish the pain and resentment he spread around him during the long, intense weeks of rehearsal.’ It seems to have been Laughton who worked most closely with the actors. Houseman again:
‘throughout his own rehearsals, and in his relations with others, he was consistently modest, sensitive and understanding. He appeared in every scene but two of the play; yet his preoccupation with his own rôle did not prevent him from spending hours of patient unselfish work with his fellow actors.’
Brecht himself, in Building a Rôle, echoing that judgement, adds:
‘the playwright was impressed by the freedom he allowed [the younger actors], by the way in which he avoided anything Laughtonish and simply taught them the structure. To those actors who were too easily impressed by his personality he read passages from Shakespeare without rehearsing the actual text; to none did he read the text itself.’
No doubt to balance Brecht’s terrifying ways – as when, for example, he screamed at the choreographer Anna Sokolow that he wanted none of her ‘tawdry Broadway dances’, after which she was replaced by Lottie Goslar – Laughton consciously brought the temperature down. This directing-in-tandem may well have suited him very well: relieved of the anxiety of supreme responsibility, he could gently and doggedly pursue the truth and the life of the play. His own performance, however, was a slightly different matter.
Norman Lloyd observed that in rehearsals, Laughton would be ‘like a baby. “You’re just being a big baby,” Losey would say. “Yes, I am,” Charles would pout. It was just games.’ Losey later said of him:
‘Charles was very mannered. One of the things that I tried to do … was to make him not use his mannerisms. He was an extraordinary actor. Extremely sensitive, extremely moody, very intuitive but with an excellent mind, tremendously moving when he got it right, often undisciplined, finding it difficult to keep something when he got it.’
The young physicist Morton Wurtele, scientific adviser on the production, reported that Laughton handled the instruments used in the experiments ‘with remarkable ease for someone without scientific training.’ There are no reports of any crisis in Laughton’s understanding or realisation of the character, and clearly no problem with realising the physical aspects of the part. The rising panic was fear of exposure: first of all in such a progressive and provocative piece; secondly to an audience at all. It had, after all, been ten years since his last stage appearance (in Peter Pan). Houseman reports that he kept his panic perfectly under control until a dress rehearsal at which Ruth Berlau was taking photographs. Suddenly Laughton released a howl of rage followed by a wave of abuse as he threatened to murder her if she did not desist at once. She fled.
‘Laughton’s outburst that night was far more than an actor’s tantrum: it was a desperate act of revolt against a man he loved and revered … the man for whom he was about to expose himself, after so many years, to the horrifying risk of personal and professional disaster on the stage.’
Brecht continued to rail at technical deficiencies: the opening was postponed by a week to July 30; at the last minute he threatened to cancel the first performance because the set had been coated with shellac. It was duly stripped ‘to reveal the grain of the wood’, as he required. Laughton had retreated to the caravan he’d had drawn up outside the theatre to serve as a dressing room. Here, according to Houseman, he fell into heavy psychosomatic slumbers ‘from which it became increasingly difficult to rouse him’. There had been a crisis at a dress rehearsal when Weigel, appalled by Laughton’s unconcealed fumbling with his scrotum during the early scenes, had sewn up his pockets. Laughton was enraged and his access to his organ was restored. Whether he continued to fumble is unreported, and indeed reports vary as to Brecht’s attitude to the whole episode: was this particular gest beyond a joke, or did he privately admire the audacious connexion Laughton was apparently making between thinking and sex? It seems a perfectly Brechtian notion.
The first night arrived, more than usually terrifying. The audience contained among others Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Kelly. ‘Turn out for the Theatah,’ crowed Variety. ‘Cinema Intelligentsia and just plain folks flocked to the Coronet Theatre last night to see Charles Laughton do his stuff as Galileo.’ Galas are ten a penny in Los Angeles, but the cross-section in the audience that night is remarkable. It was a blistering summer. Brecht reports ‘Laughton’s chief worry was the prevailing heat. He asked that trucks full of ice should be parked against the theatre walls, and fans be set in motion “so that the audience can think.”’ No doubt; it was not perhaps Laughton’s chief worry. ‘Am I doing a terrible thing?’ he asked Elsa Lanchester. ‘I have to do this. It is right. I know Larry’s company is wonderful’ – the Old Vic, then at its height under Olivier – ‘but I must do this play. This is a play for now,’ he said to Norman Lloyd, as he sipped soda water and burped – going back to babyhood, Lloyd thought. Brecht, for his part, left the theatre with the memorable phrase, ‘Ich muss ein 7-Up haben.’
Just before the show began, Lyon reports, Laughton received a telegram from Orson Welles saying that he would reveal him as a fraud: he, Welles, happened to know that the play had not been translated by Laughton at all but was the work of his, Welles’, friends, Duffield and Crocker. Welles had planned the arrival of the telegram for the minute before the curtain went up. Small surprise that Laughton is described by some reviewers as being nervous during the first scenes.
The notices, were, in a sense, irrelevant. The play was already, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘the most enormous success.’ It had sold out the moment booking opened. Admittedly, there were only seventeen performances. Interest seemed equally divided between Laughton, Brecht and the theatre company itself, Pelican Productions. And in fact, though Brecht represen
ted the reviews as being universally bad, they were mixed; even when favourable, however, they were uncomprehending, trying to deal with the play in terms of history, biography, ‘art theatre’, even propaganda. ‘An arresting footlight event’ (L.A. Times); ‘It will start as many theatre discussions as anything paraded across the stage in years’ (News). The Los Angeles Examiner found it ‘a juvenile fussy harangue’; Variety said: ‘There is a symbolic bit of business in the final scene of Bertolt Brecht’s new play. Galileo, investigating the laws of motion, rolls a small metal ball down an incline and measures its ability to roll up the other side of the U-shaped chute. It doesn’t make the grade. Neither, unfortunately, does the script.’