Charles Laughton

by Simon Callow

  As for Elsa Lanchester, who had no faith in the play anyway, she gave her well-known cabaret performance, while John Welsh as the lodger, played, as always, with quiet distinction. The play ran decently enough for its six months, coming off in November. It is, like Major Barbara, a curiously mixed episode, neither one thing nor the other. Laughton was clearly searching for some kind of expression, but never found it. No central informing notion seems to have lain behind his approach. Casting was quirky, staging uncertain or misconceived, and his own performance interpretatively somewhat neutral. He could never fail to make an impact, and, even misapplied, his talent was original and compelling. But what was he getting at? He wanted to be part of the modern world, but had none of Olivier’s instinctive sense of which horse to back. He had thought long and deep about the theatre and acting, but seemed to have reached a point of complexity in his conclusions where all the many strands of his reflection cancelled each other out, resulting in something, both in his performances and his productions, rather low-key and undefined. The parameters of his vision were becoming blurred, as if, perhaps, he no longer sought to realise it: the vision was an end in itself.

  During the run of The Party, however, a concrete proposition was put to him: Glen Byam Shaw, planning the centenary season at Stratford, invited him to play King Lear. ‘He didn’t answer and said he must be going. We said our goodbyes. He left. Two minutes later he popped his head round the door and said, ‘If you asked me to play King Lear here, I should find it hard to refuse.’ The formula he chose is significant: ‘I should find it hard to refuse.’ In other words: ‘I have been thinking about this play all my life; I owe it to myself, Shakespeare and the audience to do it.’ He went back to America at the end of The Party to prepare for it. He also agreed to play Bottom. In the midst of his urgent meditations, he was signed to act in the blockbuster, Spartacus. It was only thirteen days’ work, but it earned him a welcome $41,000.

  The film’s producer also played the title rôle: Kirk Douglas. He had assembled his galaxy of stars (Laurence Olivier, John Gavin, Tony Curtis, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons as well as Laughton) by sending each a version of the script in which he or she appeared to have the largest, most interesting part. The resulting mayhem, with temperaments being exercised and resignations being threatened, characterised the whole period of shooting. The director, Anthony Mann, was the first casualty; his replacement, Stanley Kubrick, remained hors bataille, simply arranging the physical aspects of the film as best he might (which was very well indeed: he creates a credible Roman Empire that is more convincing than any epic before or since). The actors, meanwhile, thrashed out the dialogue between themselves. Olivier, with his mastery of backstage politics, had been the first on the scene, with the result that his part was in considerably better shape than most – than Laughton’s, for example, who fell into a heavy and suspicious sulk from the first day, convinced that Olivier was out to destroy him. Fortunately, most of his scenes were with Ustinov, who volunteered to re-write them, to which Laughton happily acceded. Together they concocted the scenes that ended up in the film: Kubrick, according to Ustinov, simply shot them.

  Laughton’s pleasure in his work with Ustinov is palpable. The sensuous liberal senator Gracchus is a character to whom Charles could give himself unreservedly. His oratory in the senate gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his rhetorical gifts at their most vital (and pertinent); the eating scene with Ustinov is a miracle of sly and bashful hedonism. His warm, fleshy integrity makes the perfect balance to his opponent and rival, Crassus, played by Olivier.

  The on-screen antagonism was perhaps not difficult for Laughton to summon up. Relations between them on the floor were frosty but polite. ‘We got on quite splendidly’, wrote Olivier, ‘though I was a bit distressed at what I considered to be his discourtesies on the set, and told him so.’ Communication between them was limited by mutual wariness. Laughton envied Olivier his physical access to a range of parts that he could never play; Olivier, for his part, envied Laughton’s individuality of mind and body. It is perhaps not too much of a simplification to say that Laughton envied Olivier’s capacity to do, Olivier was jealous of Laughton’s ability to be. Both were essentially character actors, but Laughton rummaged among the capacious folds of his own personality for his rôles, while Olivier built new men on top of his. Olivier, of course, had long ago eclipsed Laughton as a classical actor in the eyes of the world, and yet there was something about Laughton that would never be his. Laughton had followed a private path, replete with cul-de-sacs and dead ends, towards a destination that he could never define, let alone reach; Olivier had bowled down the highway in pursuit of the greatest prizes, which he had easily won. The maddening thing for Olivier was that Laughton, despite having become demonstrably lost, had somehow retained his stature; the intolerable thing for Laughton was that despite approaching art and life like an athlete, rather than as an artist, Olivier had somehow penetrated the secrets of the greatest rôles.

  The chance for Godzilla, as it were, to meet King Kong, was lost when, whether entirely seriously or not, Laughton asked Olivier to direct him as King Lear. (Perhaps not entirely sincerely, because it was not in Laughton’s gift: Glen Byam Shaw was going to direct it; though no doubt something could have been arranged.) Olivier said no: ‘Because I really did not believe that he and I would get on as I really never could understand what he said to me – which meant that I was not intellectually his equal. I never really felt on quite the same level as he. What the hell would be the use of my directing him if I felt like that.’ Instead he offered him some advice: ‘If he wanted to play Lear he must go to the top of the hill on his estate every morning when the sun rose and breathe and shout the lines until he was exhausted. He rather pooh-poohed the idea.’ Of course; Olivier was talking to the man who, when he phoned Glen Byam Shaw to accept the part, had said: ‘Meet you at Stonehenge tomorrow’. And he meant it. Olivier’s excellent advice – excellent, that is, as far as it goes, like Gielgud’s advice about getting a light Cordelia – was anathema to Laughton. Olivier was interested in setting himself difficult challenges that he could crack. He won his greatness by conquering great rôles: Jack the Giant-Killer. Thus he is often to be found belittling his characters: ‘Lear is easy, he’s just a stupid old fart. He’s got this frightful temper. He’s completely selfish and utterly inconsiderate. He does not for a moment think of the consequences of what he has said. He is simply bad-tempered arrogance with a crown perched on top. He obviously wasn’t spanked by his mother often enough. I mean, to turn away from his favourite daughter like that, what kind of an idiot is he?’ The shade of Laughton seems to shudder at the very echo of Olivier’s words from On Acting. For Laughton, the greatness of the great rôles resided in their unfathomable complexity, the depths of experience which they explored and embodied, and the dignity and importance of acting them was that one attempted to realise some part of that complexity. The horror of acting, and the reason one shied away from it, even, one might say, evaded it, was the impossibility of getting anywhere near fulfilling it.

  The terrible paradox, however, is that, whatever the vulgarity and reductiveness of Olivier’s conception of a part, his physical command of both the text and his own instrument resulted in performances which far exceeded the limitations of his interpretations. The part installed itself in his chords and limbs, and took on a life of its own; whereas no matter how profound and imaginative Laughton’s connection with the inner life of the play, the constriction of his physical apparatus meant that the point of ignition never arrived. A further terrible paradox is that Olivier’s shorter perspectives meant that he drew energy from the achievability of his objectives; Laughton was wearied by the task before he’d even begun.

  Gielgud and Olivier were regarded (principally by Olivier) as rivals, each gifted in ways that the other would like to have been. But their theatre was the same theatre; they were running the same race. Olivier and Laughton, however, could hardly be said to be practis
ing the same art. Laughton the deep-sea diver who had to keep coming up for air, Olivier the surfer whose skill took him to places he never meant to go; they had the sea in common, but that was all.

  In Spartacus, the two modes can be seen side by side: Olivier, in what is perhaps a trial run for his Coriolanus, which he was about to play in Stratford in the same season as Charles would play Lear, plays Crassus like a knife: it is an entirely linear performance with every point brilliantly made. His glacial patrician manner, his ruthless ambition, his strong desire for his handsome young slave, are all cleanly and sharply indicated; it is as if there were a thin black line drawn around the role. Laughton’s Gracchus has no such boundaries, no such definition. It spreads, floats, expands, contracts. The whole massive expanse of flesh seems to be filled with mind – thoughts are conceived, born and die in different parts of that far-flung empire. Sedentary for the most part, Gracchus seethes with potential movement. He is a jelly that has escaped the mould; Olivier’s (and Crassus’s) sharp knife can gain no purchase on it. Not surprisingly, when the time came for Olivier to shoot the close-ups for his big scene with Charles, he sweetly indicated that he would find it easier to do if Charles weren’t actually around. Charles was triumphantly hurt by this.

  Olivier was of course right about the Lear. How could they possibly have worked together? When Spartacus finished, they went off to their separate preparations for the coming season of which they were the twin pillars. Larry went into training to lick a particularly tricky bugger, Coriolanus; Charles took thought, then loaded himself up with the spiritual provisions he would need on his terrible trip to the bottom of the ocean called Lear.

  Shakespeare

  IN A SENSE, of course, Laughton had been preparing for King Lear all his life. From the moment he started giving interviews, he had been alluding to the play, sometimes representing it as the ultimate summit, sometimes as a byword for the irrelevance of Shakespeare to the modern world, depending on how defensive he felt at any moment. He never ceased to feel, from the beginning, that an actor’s proper place was in the theatre, playing the classics; but he often felt excluded from the charmed circles where his contribution might be acknowledged. So – and this is typical of his way – he denounced the classics and embraced the movies, claiming for them all kinds of greatness, potential and actual, which would make his involvement in them seem important, would give his life value. In time, however, his passionate attentions to the art of film were received more coolly, until finally, in high dudgeon, he turned his back on them, condescending to return to them only for commercial considerations. By now, his enthusiasm had moved elsewhere: to the touring circuit, person to person contact with the people, spreading The Word. Literally the word; people, he discovered, were hungry for stories and the stirring phrases which the movies, with their growing illiteracy, had denied them. And among the stories and the phrases were, of course, many by Shakespeare. Not that he had ever for a moment, in his heart, left off loving Shakespeare, studying Shakespeare, puzzling over Shakespeare. Shakespeare was his breviary, his rosary, his private devotion. Shakespeare was also his crossword puzzle, his unsolved equation, his everlasting riddle. But most of all, Shakespeare was his Great White Whale, haunting and mocking him, appearing tantalisingly on the horizon of whatever waters he might be amiably paddling, or perhaps (his favourite posture for contemplation) floating in, as Peter Ustinov put it, ‘like a topsy-turvy iceberg,’ and all the roles and all the plays had somehow dissolved before The One, Lear. It touched his life at so many points that he had come to see the play as his spiritual autobiography: the man more sinned against than sinning, but who, demonstrably, had brought his fate on his own head; the man engaged in a baffling journey through pain and despair towards – hopefully – some sort of tender resolution.

  His preparation consisted as much, therefore, of work on himself as on the part. He co-opted Elsa Lanchester as his assistant and adviser; together they delved the depths. ‘The strain had become very heavy but exciting for both of us. He had become Lear. He couldn’t sleep at night, not because he was thinking of the words but because he was tortured. Lear was always with him.’ They found a thread in the play which perfectly expressed the yearning for resolution central to Laughton and Lear: ‘The extraordinary connection and repetition of references to water, climaxed by the great storm scene. It was like an outburst of tears, that storm, because there are so many references to water – water animals, rivers, dolphins. It was like a collecting of water behind the eyes and then the storm comes and the tears, and then tears for the terrible death of Cordelia at the end. So we restudied the water theme. We were learning to stretch the water and the tears so that it would be contagious to the audience, a building up of overflowing sorrow, the pressure of tears.’ They spent some time, during this preparation, in Hawaii, in touch with the natural world which so dominates Lear, surrounded by mountains, caught in storms, cut off by floods. And Laughton entered there on the island into a most strange and poetic friendship. Lanchester’s moving account reads: ‘His name was Passio. He was a dancer the like of which I have never seen. His dancing and his gestures were beautiful, but he would rarely come out to be seen … Charles by his kindness and gentleness, reached the boy’s spirit and helped Passio to dance for a small group … on a moonlit night on the beach. Passio danced! He used flaming torches that licked around his whole body and seemed to become part of him. He was the moon and the moonlight on the sea, and it was just the most extraordinary experience that I’ve ever known.’ Filled with all this, they returned to Los Angeles, where Charles amazed Elsa by buying some peyote: ‘‘I want to get as far into the character of Lear as I can.’ (Later, rather proudly, he reported no effect.)’

  Leaving America for England, Laughton told Terry Sanders that he was going to play King Lear. ‘But I shall fail, of course.’

  The Stratford season, a somewhat spurious 100th anniversary season (‘A few people might have done a bit of Morris dancing on the walls a hundred years ago, and said a couple of speeches from As You Like It,’ said Albert Finney), was the end of Glen Byam Shaw’s régime, and he’d assembled an astonishing group of actors and directors to mark it. Paul Robeson would play Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago, Tony Richardson directing; Edith Evans would play the Countess in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well; Olivier would play Coriolanus, and Charles would play Lear and Bottom. It was a grand flourish which celebrated and brought to a conclusion a very honourable tradition at Stratford initiated by Barry Jackson, brought to glory by Anthony Quayle, and sustained by Byam Shaw: that of the big guns, spending an ill-paid summer playing the parts they would have no chance of doing anywhere else. The director-designate, Peter Hall, was about to effect the transformation Quayle and Shaw knew must come about: the institution of a permanent company, exploring the canon in a systematic and thematic manner, and keeping themselves alive to contemporary resonance by performing new plays as well. This tradition has now itself been replaced by a new free-for-all no longer sustained by a star system. The Jackson–Quayle–Shaw régime begins to assume the patina of a golden age.

  In 1959, to judge by the contemporary press, Laughton was the biggest of the big guns; or perhaps he was the greatest novelty. ‘Laughton to play Lear’; ‘Charles Laughton to Star as Bottom and Lear’; ‘A Star-studded Stratford: Shakespeare with Laughton, Olivier, Robeson and Edith Evans!’ The headlines can only have filled him with more fear, but it is an interesting indicator of the extent of his fame. The first night of The Party had been mobbed. Enid Bagnold, with whom he experienced a brief, intense friendship during his English sojourn, noted this.

  His glamour included a touch of the conjuror: an element that needed police cohorts to protect him from crowd-adoration. His ‘fame’ fascinated me. I know one or two great actors, but they are protected in the street by a quality of invisibility. Laurence Olivier especially. Charles’s fame in a mob would take the Duke of Windsor at the height of the Abdication to e
qual it. His unique ugliness plus the film of Henry VIII got him spotted. Spotted in a way that gave him claustrophobia. Old ladies swarmed, holding out pencils for autographs. Women pushing prams swivelled the four wheels towards him. Here on the Village Green tourists nudged each other and walked nearer, as he hurried into the car. It frightened him, he hated it, but he wouldn’t have been without it. It was his honey and his cross.

  His performances at Stratford would certainly not be protected by a quality of invisibility. For a man sometimes accused of cowardice, it was an extremely brave thing to do. He had not appeared in a classical play since 1933, over twenty-five years; and when he had done, he had been slated. He had not worked within the English profession, except for the odd, unsatisfactory interlude of The Party, for twenty-five years, either: he had no idea how his colleagues, and, in some cases, contemporaries would receive him. He was offering himself for inevitable comparison with, in Edith Evans and Laurence Olivier, two of the giants of the modern classical theatre. (A third giant, Gielgud, was absent, and had, as it happens, originated the suggestion that Laughton be invited to Stratford.) The strength and confidence he had acquired in America had come largely from his authority as a teacher and his authority on text; here that did not apply. Here he was an actor among actors, many of whom had much greater experience than he in playing these texts. He was tackling a part that was widely held to be unplayable. But above all, he was going to attempt to do justice to his lifetime of meditation on what he held to be the supreme statement about human life.