Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  Teaching

  THE GIRL FROM Manhattan is one of the more enigmatic films in Laughton’s output, though not quite as enigmatic as its predecessor, made in between the Los Angeles and New York runs of Galileo. Entitled either On Our Merry Way or A Miracle can Happen, that film had four directors, three directors of photography, two art directors and a large and fairly prestigious cast, among whom the name of Charles Laughton does not appear, because his episode, for reasons shrouded in mystery, was cut. David O. Selznick, it was rumoured, offered to buy the deleted episode and destroy the rest, but the offer was not taken up. Laughton had become involved only on account of his growing friendship with Burgess Meredith, the film’s producer. One of the film’s producers. The other was, somehow inevitably, Benedict Bogeaus, who was also to be the producer of The Girl from Manhattan. The enigma of this film consists largely in its having been seen by no one. There is an awful silence about it, though a no doubt apocryphal anecdote from the filming would have brought a grim smile of satisfaction to Agate’s lips: there is (apparently) a baby in the story, and this baby would not stop crying. Finally Laughton went over to the baby and murmured something into its ears. Immediately the baby fell asleep. On being asked what he had so effectively whispered, Laughton answered: ‘The Gettysburg address. It has such a wonderful rhythm, you know.’ For the rest: the film was directed by the veteran Alfred E. Green, who had just made The Jolson Story, and was soon to make The Eddie Cantor Story; it was written by Howard Estabrook, screenwriter on A Bill of Divorcement, Cimarron and The Bridge of San Luis Rey; and it starred Dorothy Lamour, who was also in On Our Merry Way/ A Miracle can Happen. Most writers on Laughton pass rapidly over The Girl from Manhattan, and it seems the only sensible thing to do.

  Certainly it must have seemed very small beer after the intoxication of Galileo. Fortunately for Laughton, he was able to come down gently from that experience. A succession of Girls from Manhattan, or worse, no work at all (which once unimaginable eventuality was becoming increasingly feasible) would have destroyed everything that he had gained in the years with Brecht. Instead, he had met a young actor called Bill Cotrell, who had had some pre-war experience with the Oregon Shakespeare Association. In attempting to establish something similar in Hollywood, Cotrell had been deluged by 1500 applications, which he whittled down to twenty or so. At first the plan, devised by him and Kate Drain Lawson, Houseman’s associate at Pelican Productions, appears to have been to involve various teachers, but at one of the sifting sessions, before the group’s composition had quite been decided on, there was a clash of titans between the two heavyweight older actors present – Laughton and Thomas Gomez, a renowned movie villain. In avoirdupois, there was little to choose between them; but Laughton put on a brilliant display, reading a great chunk of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all the parts, of course – till Gomez, cursing, retreated into the street. From then on, it seems pretty much to have been Laughton’s class.

  This is the group referred to in the postscript of the letter to Eric Bentley. In full, it reads: ‘I have started a Shakespearean group, training a bunch of American actors and actresses in the business of verse speaking and prose speaking. We have been working together some 8 or 9 months, three evenings a week for three hours, and I believe that in another year (it will take no more, but will also take no less) we shall be the best team of speakers in the English language. I am doing this solely with the aim of getting a company together that can play Brecht’s plays. I want to see Galileo really performed, and Circle of Chalk and Mother Courage, and the rest of them. I am devoting all my spare energies to that end.’

  Nobody in the group seems to have been aware that their ultimate goal was to become the Berliner Ensemble of California; but otherwise it was just as Laughton says. Very hard, methodical, regular and committed work; methodical, that is, in its thoroughness – there was no system. The group assembled three evenings a week, in the so-called schoolroom at Laughton’s Pacific Palisades house – the very room where he and Brecht had wrought their version of Galileo. There, buried deep in his armchair, surveyed by a Vlaminck, a Utrillo and a tiny Douanier Rousseau, he talked to his students, in Elsa Lanchester’s words, ‘with feeling and passion about being able to relate one art to another, and it was there for them to see’. Billy Wilder suggested that the classes served ‘to make them think, to live, to understand more – to initiate them.’ And years later, Shelley Winters, briefly one of the class, telegraphed Laughton: YOU GAVE ME THE DISCIPLINE AND LOVE OF THE THEATRE THE RESPECT AND BELIEF IN MYSELF THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE POETRY THAT CONNECTS ALL MANKIND BUT FOR YOU MY FATE MIGHT HAVE BEEN THE SAME AS POOR MARILYN’S.

  Clearly what was being imparted was as much inspirational and spiritual as technical or academic. Certainly there was no question of Laughton passing on skills or tricks. He of all actors was the last person to attempt that – not that he lacked either; simply that that was not his conception of acting. It was a vision of acting that he wanted to convey, not a formula. Lanchester says that he was an alchemist who wanted to pass on his secrets. That, no doubt, is true; but his powers of transmutation were not to be worked by mechanical means. They called for a state of mind. What Laughton was propagating, in short, was art, not craft. He was trying to awaken in his students an awareness of – well, yes, in Miss Winters’ phrase – ‘the poetry that connects all mankind’.

  He did have, it must be admitted, an idée fixe, which was both technical and academic, and must have seemed odd to his students in the light of everything else he seemed to stand for. This was The Iambic Pentameter, which, since his outright rejection of it fifteen years before at the Vic, he had now elevated to a central place in his conception of Shakespearean acting. With ruthless rigidity he imposed it on his class. The metronome dominated the room. Sometimes he even made them bounce a ball as they spoke: ti tum, ti tum, ti tum. It was as if, having been criticised in the past for failing to observe the rhythm, he had said: ‘You want iambic pentameters? Right, I’ll give you iambic pentameters!’ Another sort of sulk.

  In his teaching, as in his work, his best results had not been, and never would be, in Shakespeare; but his engagement with the problems and the challenges of verse drama was of inestimable value to his life as an artist. It is doubtful whether a day in Laughton’s life went by without him speaking a line of Shakespearean verse, resounding it in his mind, turning it over, questioning it, trying to make it release its truth to him. It could even be that Shakespeare meant too much for him ever to perform the work successfully. Sensing the potential in every participle, unable to choose between the thousand alternative interpretations, trembling with delight at the sensuous beauty of each word, he was, like an over-ardent lover, doomed never to consummate his passion. His love was almost an end in itself.

  Better, however, to love unproductively than not to love at all.

  The form of the class was always the same: it started with an unstructured question and answer session, a general discussion, not necessarily related to acting; then they moved on to the session proper, in which they would work on various texts. Charles obviously strove to make the class as unpredictable as possible; he’d suddenly ask someone to read something, or he’d read something himself, now analysing the structure of a part, now looking for its key. He’d talk about types of actor: he divided them into, on the one hand, presentational (personality actors, stars, of whom Gary Cooper was the supreme example, who were more pure as actors because nobody else could do what they did; they were thus vertical) and, on the other hand, representational. These were horizontal; they were less pure because they encompassed aspects of other people; they were always intellectual, because they were obliged to analyse and break down their rôles. Or he put it another way: some actors put a coat on and it looked perfectly natural on them; others put on a coat and changed physically because of the coat.

  Whatever the value of the teaching to his students (and at the very least, they came away from his classes with an exalted sense o
f the dignity and importance of the profession, and of its interconnectedness with the other arts), its value to him was enormous. As he taught, he learned: the experience of all teachers. But, listened to raptly by the eager young, he began to believe in himself; began to believe he was worth something. And watching the seeds he was sowing begin to flower satisfied both his creative and his paternal impulses. Elsa Lanchester notes that he boasted of his students’ achievements like a proud father – ‘mother’ might perhaps be more appropriate – nurturing them, tending them, binding them to him with strong emotional ties.

  Ernest Jones had predicted that teaching would calm his soul: and indeed, ‘he became a happier, more contented man. He was less morose and actually seemed to enjoy his other activities more’ (Lanchester). Producing had been an attempt at creating something outside of himself. It was not a good choice. Throughout the forties his creativity, so vastly engaged in his performances of the previous decade, went subterranean as he grew towards a new means of self-expression. Teaching was one of the few visible outlets for it; in some senses it was the prototype of his later activities, all of which were to some degree heuristic.

  On the classes went, calmly and dedicatedly. From time to time, he had to go away to make some money; bit by bit, too, the more famous members of the group (Suzanne Cloutier, Robert Ryan, and, of course, Shelley Winters) drifted off to pursue their careers. But a solid nucleus stayed together, and – a sure mark of seriousness – even continued working while Laughton was away.

  His first departure was to make another film for Robert Leonard, produced, this time, by Pandro S. Berman, who seems to have ensured a higher standard of production than Laughton was becoming accustomed to. The film is The Bribe, little known now, little liked then, but in fact a rather good film with a distinctly wow finish – a chase through a fiesta, against a backdrop of exploding fireworks. (It is unkindly suggested that this sequence was in fact directed by Vincente Minelli. It’s worthy of him.) The tone of the film is interestingly impassioned beneath its fast pace and terse dialogue. Its failure with the 1949 critics was precisely in its refusal to send itself up. ‘The Bribe is the sort of temptation which Hollywood put in the way of gullible moviegoers about twenty years ago – without one little wink at the audience or the slightest protrusion of tongue in cheek’ – complained Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. Paradoxically, its seriousness makes it seem, at this remove, not dated, but surprisingly modern. The moral and emotional mess in which the characters work out their destinies is thoroughly familiar to us. The slight blankness (woodenness is the standard term) of Robert Taylor in the leading rôle only contributes to the sense of modernity. Ava Gardner, as the singer with whom he falls in love, entirely lacks the self-mockery of a Lauren Bacall, say. The Bribe is neither romantic nor hyper-dramatic: there is a veil of ambiguity over its events. This forms a perfect context for Laughton’s J.J. Bealer, a performance of Graham Greene-ish complexity: a broken-down sot, pawn of circumstances, craven, weakly aggressive, ingratiating, threatening. R.R. Anger writes: ‘It is Charles Laughton’s great triumph that he tears this acknowledgement of J.J. Bealer’s humanness from our unwilling selves, as we watch Bealer plot, betray and extort, driven by the basic and simple need to be relieved from pain.’ Surely something like the opposite is true: it is the pitiless revelation of Bealer’s moral bankruptcy which is borne in on us, made the more piercing by the human and ordinary weaknesses with which he is endowed – his bad feet, for example, or his hunger. The man Bealer is constantly begging for sympathy, pleading special circumstances; it is the actor’s triumph to stop us from being deflected from the utter corruption they mask. ‘Inside this moral cripple, Laughton is saying,’ continues Mr Anger, ‘is a man.’ On the contrary, inside this man, Laughton is saying, is a moral cripple. This ruthless exposure is accomplished with strokes so deft, so accurate that a whole new possibility for Laughton’s acting suddenly opens up; never, alas, to be pursued.

  If the performance was perceived by contemporary filmmakers the way it was by the critic of the New York Times, it’s scarcely surprising: ‘Charles Laughton simpers and fidgets as the scummy “fixer” who has considerable trouble with sore feet.’ That’s it. Simpering and fidgeting are words that come up in Laughton notices with monotonous regularity. These things become critical reflexes: Laughton? Simper and fidget, of course! If that’s what you’re expecting, that’s what you’ll see. In his next film, The Man on the Eiffel Tower, his worst enemy couldn’t accuse him of simpering or fidgeting. Unfortunately, he does nothing at all, as far as the eye can detect. His Maigret, which might have been rather interesting – his Poirot having been such a triumph – is soporific to the point of catatonia; a somnambulistic performance which does nothing to clarify or expedite a severely turgid plot. After a while, he totally abandons the accent which he half-heartedly essays at the beginning. It is only in the final chase sequence that he shows any life, and then he becomes very dynamic, but not, unfortunately, any more interesting. It is one of the few performances in his output which has almost nothing to recommend it.

  The film, however, is of great significance in his career, because with it he made his directorial début. According to Charles Higham, he found it impossible to work with Irving Allan, the designated director (who was also the producer), so Franchot Tone, whose company was making the film, decided to attempt a bold experiment in co-operative film-making: the actors would take over. Burgess Meredith would take overall responsibility and direct all the scenes he wasn’t in; Charles would direct all the scenes he wasn’t in and Tone would do anything left over. This arrangement left Charles in charge of the beginning and the end of the film: as it happens, the only parts of it worth watching. The final chase is exciting enough, and uses the Parisian streets to very good effect (the credits, quite properly, end with ‘and the City of Paris’); but the film’s opening sequence has real flair and menace, as the camera slowly takes the scene in. The director of photography was Stanley Cortez, Welles’ cameraman on The Magnificent Ambersons, and he must have offered advice to all three tyro directors. It is only here, though, at the beginning, that anything approaching an expressive frame is achieved. For the rest it’s visually efficient, no more. ‘Everybody left Paris to catch a ship, leaving me and Charles behind to do the finishing sequences. That’s when I got to thinking Charles would make a good director,’ wrote Cortez later. ‘I saw Paris through his eyes, all of Paris; and he knew Paris better than most Frenchmen.’

  Laughton had evidently lost all interest in acting while absorbed and challenged by the new medium. Certainly the actress he introduced into the picture, Belita, at that time topping the bill at Les Ambassadeurs as an ice-skater, had enormous time and thought lavished on her in her rôle as the lens-grinder’s wife. He took her to Les Halles to pick exactly the right skirts for the layers and layers of clothes he decided she must wear – pointed out possible models for her character in the streets. He offered her all his enormous concentration and power of inspiration, leaving none over, it would appear, for his own performance.

  Back in Los Angeles, he deemed his group of students was ready to work on a play for public presentation: or perhaps he deemed he was ready to direct a play. He was nearly fifty by the time he came to this point: his contemporaries in England, Gielgud and Olivier, had started directing without a moment’s hesitation almost as soon as their names appeared above the lights. It was the tradition – the obligation, one might say. To lead a company, to put plays on, was synonymous with directing. They staged the most complex plays in a matter of weeks, with themselves in vast and difficult leading rôles; both Gielgud and Olivier, for example, had directed themselves in King Lear. Such a thought would have been inconceivable to the young Laughton: his self-consciousness would never have allowed him to organise or control other people; besides, his own performances were all-absorbing. For the older Laughton, the problem was that he saw so much in the play, was aware of such depths and resonances, all of which he wa
nted to capture, that the ordinary conditions available for staging it would simply be inadequate. In time, he would find that no longer true; for the present, teaching with the group offered an ideal halfway house. He knew them, he trusted them, they had plenty of time. Perhaps they could begin to do justice to some great play … and, providentially, at that moment, Eugénie Leontovich, who, after her great triumphs in Grand Hotel and Twentieth Century, had also established a teaching group with whom she had been performing plays at her own Stage Theatre (a converted hat-shop) approached Charles and suggested that they collaborate. She would contribute the theatre, he would direct, and his students (none of hers) would form the company. He and she would play the leading parts. And so, after due consideration, The Cherry Orchard, a play which Charles by now knew rather well, was settled on.

  Rehearsals were spread out over three months. The pre-rehearsal symposium was maintained, now followed by work on the play. Charles’ method was straightforward: everybody was expected to know their lines, he placed them and then worked line by line on the scene. He was a hard, hard taskmaster. He directed, on the whole, by demonstration, a daunting procedure if there were any expectation of imitation, but what Charles was aiming at was a physical shorthand, the most vivid way of suggesting the inner sensation of the character, the suggested route for the transformation. He never gave inflexions or line readings; what he was attempting to suggest was another way of being. His demonstrations were complete transformations: when he was working with actresses he would become more feminine than any of them, with actors he revealed unexpected athleticism. Belita, who had begged to be allowed to join the group, and finally did after a six-month apprenticeship of making coffee and doing the tidying up – at a time when she was the most famous ice-skater in the world! – was amazed by his physical freedom. ‘He’d sort of stretch out and his whole body, which you know was quite large, would sort of get thin.’ He wanted to bring Marcel Marceau to Hollywood to give the group lessons. He’d already laid on – at his own expense – voice classes with a celebrated voice coach of the day, Margaret Prentice MacLean. He was, as he said to Bentley, training the group. If he was an actor-manager, it was in a completely different sense to the familiar English one; it had more in common with the French tradition, of men like Copeau, Dullin, Jouvet: actor-philosophers, proponents of a new way. It is hard to say what that new way was, in Laughton’s case. His theoretical musings have the air of being elaborate rationalisations of intuitive understanding. He used many techniques – an exercise called ‘tell me a story,’ for example, in which he’d stop rehearsal and have the actors tell stories, any kind of stories, to restore their sense of narrative – but what he stood for was simply deeper and deeper exploration into the characters and the rôles until the hard nugget of the real was struck. Laughton has so often been described (not least in these pages) as a realist, and so he is, but what he was after, both as actor and as director, was not in fact realism; reality was what he sought, the location and presentation of the real. Not verisimilitude (if that’s the criterion, then he frequently fails), but something which has its own life and truth; which is its own reality.