by Simon Callow
Earlier, in the previous year, he had made several television appearances on various shows, reading the Bible or telling stories. So powerful was his image as The Reader that Ed Sullivan, on one show, had said to him, ‘I bet you could read anything and make it sound great,’ and Laughton had read out a national insurance form, and proved his host right. On another occasion, he even deputed for Sullivan. As it happens, this was a historic programme: Elvis Presley’s first appearance on television. It shows, almost diagramatically, the degree to which Laughton belonged to the old world which Presley and his contemporaries were on the edge of sweeping away. Laughton is charming, in the manner of an accomplished after-dinner speaker: rather long-winded and self-conscious, telling lame jokes, pretending to lack culture (mentions the Budapest Quartet playing Brahms, and makes a philistine face, as if to say: anyone who enjoys chamber music is a bore, a snob and a liar) and is terribly coy, sexually. He introduces a couple of variety acts and someone singing a ballad, quotes a poem himself (Keats, but he makes it sound very steamy) and then tells us that we’re going over to Las Vegas, where Elvis Presley is waiting to talk to us. His manner is pleasantly condescending. The moment Presley hits the screen, the entire world of Saturday Evening Post niceness and seasoned naughtiness is swept away and – to the tune of uncontrolled squealing from little girls in the audience – we are in the presence of a sexuality so naked it brings a blush to the cheeks. Presley is gauche, casual, rather high, in fact; he seems about to burst out of his clothes. His eyes, his mouth, his whole physical manner suggests recent, or imminent, sexual gratification. His little spiel to the camera is accompanied by a simmering hysteria from the young female audience, which with a thrust of his hips, or a pout, or a wicked wink, he can bring instantly to the boil. When we return to the New York studio, Laughton looks as if he might be going to faint; instead he laughs nervously. Presley has just indicated, as loud and clear as if he’s held up a placard with the words printed on it, fucking is great. However agreeably Laughton has been discharging his duties on the show, after Presley he can only look shifty. However out of step with society he might have been, sexually, he had spent his whole life trying to give every appearance of not being so. His life had been defined by his world’s view of sex. The sexual Bastille was about to be stormed; he, a prisoner inside it, was more frightened of the liberating mob than of his own gaolers. He suddenly, on this Ed Sullivan Show, looks like the Victorian he always, essentially, was.
There were two more television acting performances: in an episode of Wagon Train, and an episode of Checkmate, which had the justifying perk of taking him to Japan, whose art Charles had so profoundly embraced. He did a further reading tour of the midwest, and then Otto Preminger approached him to play the sly Southern Senator Seab Cooley in his film of Advise and Consent, the blockbuster in which Allen Drury ‘takes the lid off Washington’. The rôle, one of the best in the film, had a special point of interest for Laughton: the character is strongly homophobic. Once more he would offer a portrait of the oppressor by the oppressed. Happily, this, his last performance, is one of his most satisfying. He worked very hard, despite illness, and flung himself into learning the accent (he based it on that of Senator Stennis, whom he watched for some weeks, eventually persuading him to record the whole part into a tape-recorder). His physical weakness he used to characterise Cooley, who has the appearance in the film of a lazy cat nonchalantly playing with a trapped bird. The physical sleepiness of the performance is brilliantly contradicted by its great mental alertness, and the climactic speech before the senate, entirely shot in one take, is as fine a tirade as he ever played. With his baggy white suit and black velvet hat he creates a memorable vision of reactionary charm. Preminger loved him, and he loved Preminger, which is not at all what might have been expected. ‘I thought Laughton would not need or want direction from me. Instead he asked for it, and paid close attention to my suggestions … I learned a great deal from him.’ For all his tantrums, mainly directed at actors of limited gifts (whom he had cast!), Preminger was no von Sternberg: he had run one of Reinhardt’s theatres in Vienna before the war, he had been a stage director and an actor himself. He would not have failed to perceive that Laughton was the real thing.
From Laughton’s point of view, it may be that his physical condition concentrated his mind wonderfully; he had neither time nor energy to spare for conflict.
Preminger’s film, though replete with good performances (Franchot Tone, Walter Pidgeon, Gene Tierney), is ponderous and overblown; Laughton, in his handful of scenes, seems to dominate it. His reviews were enthusiastic, and even a little surprised. It had been a long time since Laughton had hit the nail on the head; when he did, there were few to compare with him.
At the beginning of 1962, though far from well, he undertook another reading tour; at Flint, Michigan, he fell in his bath, and broke his shoulder. It proved to be cancer; he never really recovered. Billy Wilder, late in 1961, had asked him to play Moustache in Irma La Douce, which he was planning for the following year. All through Charles’ last illness he clung on to the hope that he might yet do so; thus it was that when, on 15 December 1962, he died, he was sporting a luxuriant white moustache.
Coda
LIKE KING LEAR’S, Laughton’s death came from a long way off; and when it came, it was terrible. His health had stood up remarkably well to the demands he made of it. His back was a more or less continuous source of trouble, which may have had something to do with his wartime experience (the poison gas had given him severe hives) and of course, he was vastly too heavy for his size, which can create unnatural strain on the spine. Of his fatness, he wrote: ‘I used to say I was fat because there was something wrong with my pituitary gland. A lot of people do that sort of thing but it is always because we eat too much – I don’t know why I eat too much. I was told the other day it was because I must have some deep, basic unhappiness and that I ought to go to a psychoanalyst to find out what it is. But I’m not going to a psychoanalyst. I am not that much interested in myself. I’ll go on a diet instead – sometime next month!’ Although this passage is full of the disingenuousness which characterises his public persona, it is true that Laughton did not seem to want to know about the causes of his behaviour, and, far from trying to counteract any trait which seemed to him unpleasant or regrettable, he seemed to go further and deeper into it. There had been occasions in the past where a part demanded that he should lose weight, and he had been able to do so; but had immediately returned to his comforting padding. He ate hugely and indiscriminately, being as happy with an overflowing plate of corned beef and hash as with the plus haute of haute cuisine. He would eat at any and all times, though he never drank before five in the afternoon. Then he would consume Martinis at a fairly steady rate. He hated drunks, but his consumption of alcohol was not insignificant.
This way of life took its toll on the gall-bladder, which then provoked his heart-attack. He recovered well enough from that, but was then obliged to have two operations for the infected organ. And to undergo that he had to lose a great deal of weight, which he did. The operations were painful: ‘I got an infected wound and had to be cut open a couple of times – without benefit of anaesthetic … your crucified son-in-law with a gash in his side,’ wrote Charles to Elsa’s mother. He barely had the strength to see the first preview of Elsa Lanchester – Herself; shortly afterwards, he seemed to undergo some kind of a nervous breakdown threatening to kill himself with pills, or throw himself out of the window. ‘I have been deeply disturbed these last months. I have never been sick, and found it hard to conceal from you my stupid state of mind,’ he wrote to his agent and friend, Taft Schreiber. Evidently he received a vivid intimation of death. He recovered, however, sufficiently to go to Japan and Hong Kong for Checkmate, and to do a reading tour of the South. His health began to concern him again during the filming of Advise and Consent, but he flogged himself on. At the beginning of 1962, he had a fall in his bath right at the beginning of yet another rea
ding tour, and in reality, he never got up again. There followed eleven months of increasing agony for Laughton and those who looked on, while the cancer of the bone, initially stemming from the kidney, made its fatal way round his body. At first, the surgeons believed they had contained it by excising a piece of infected bone; but they were wrong. It continued relentlessly, colonising more and more of him. For some months he stayed in the St Moritz hotel in New York, near the hospital; then he was brought back to California, where, in the Cancer Center, he received cobalt treatment. By now he was paralysed below the waist, so he had a spine operation that restored the feeling in his limbs; but he was never able to walk on his own again. His weight fell to 90 lbs – under seven stone. He had to be turned over every half hour; but every movement was excruciating for him. Wonder drug after wonder drug was tried on him; nothing availed. Finally, he slipped away, after weeks of unconsciousness.
It is the usual terrible tale; but it was rendered especially terrible by the power of his actor’s imagination. Everything – the pain, the fear, the hope – was multiplied by a thousand. He screamed with agony, begging the nurses to give him his drugs before they were due – ‘Charles had shots every two or three hours, but he always wanted more. It was always a race between pain and drugs.’ As the drugs swamped his system he became prey to hallucinations – about witchcraft, for example. ‘He believed,’ wrote Christopher Isherwood, ‘the doctor was practising witchcraft and was trying to get control of his mind. ‘Of course,’ said Charles, ‘he can only have it for very short periods.’ And I realised that Charles was mixing up this witchcraft fantasy with show business and this became even more evident when he asked me, ‘How much do you think I’d be paid as a witch?’ ‘A great deal,’ I told him, and this seemed to please him.’ The cobalt treatment room, which he dreaded, released much less pleasing images. He thought that the device used in the treatment was a secret camera and that he was being filmed in the nude. He screamed and wept and protested. A dream he had deeply disturbed him: that Orson Welles and Elsa were watching him perform on stage. They’d told him that they were running away together. As he performed, his bowels gave way, and in front of the audience he shat himself.
Later, he became convinced that Advise and Consent had won the best film award at Cannes, and that he would be going to France. To sustain this notion, Lanchester bought new clothes and even had a smallpox vaccination; but by then it was forgotten. And he was certain that he’d be able to play Moustache in Irma la Douce. ‘Don’t listen to whatever they tell you, it’s not true. I’ll prove it – come and see me at my house,’ he said to Billy Wilder. ‘I went that lunchtime … he had had his male nurse dress him up, comb his hair, shave him, maybe even put a little make-up on him, and he was sitting in a chair by the swimming-pool. He said, ‘Now look at me. Do I look like someone that’s going to die?’ And he got himself out of the chair and he walked round the pool. He must have been in tremendous pain, but he just wanted to say to me, ‘Wait’. This was one of the finest performances, I tell you. I was very touched.’
Burgess Meredith visited him regularly, often simply sitting and holding his hand; one day Laughton unexpectedly looked up, and said, with the utmost lucidity: ‘Buzzy, I don’t think the director knows what he’s doing, do you? Do you think I can get out of this picture?’ ‘No, Charlie,’ Meredith replied, ‘the director’s really not up to his job. You’re too big for him.’
When she was told of the terminal nature of Charles’ illness, Elsa Lanchester wrote, ‘I knew that I was being freed of something, I was a kind of Ariel who was being freed from Prospero.’ Elsewhere she writes: ‘Charles often associated me with Cordelia – I would speak my mind, as Cordelia did, to the point of hurting.’ By the end of his life, their relationship would appear to have declined to less classical models: more like something invented by, say, August Strindberg, or Edward Albee. Charles’ conduct as a patient over such a hideously long period of time can have done nothing to modify the underlying tension. Bruce Zortman, Laughton’s secretary and amanuensis, who was around all through the illness, reports a resentment bordering on physical violence on Elsa’s part – she would prod and shake his diseased bones if he vexed her. But the strain on her mind and her health can scarcely be underestimated. She gave up her life for his last year, but this sacrifice was taken for granted. ‘I thought he might occasionally thank me for something I’d done – even for the fish I’d cooked for him. Maybe he was remembering all the resentments he had for me.’ She had her resentments, too. ‘Inside I really hated Charles for it,’ she wrote of a typical incident between them, ‘and I would nurse that deep hatred all through the years.’ The incident is a sharp insight into the nature of the violence they did to each other: she had bought a mask that Charles had also seen but not liked – ‘the greenish head had an erotic expression so powerful that I think Charles was actually frightened of it. It was too masculine, too strong for him. But he said to me: “That’s your taste. You like it, all right, that’s fine. You should have something you like.” As it happens,’ Lanchester continues, ‘of all the works of art in their house, this was the one visitors were mesmerised by. Charles never explained to them that I had picked it out, that it was mine. Nothing was said.’ And then, one day, without telling her, Laughton sold it. ‘I only said, “Oh dear.” Charles then apologised. “I know I shouldn’t have done it.” Nothing much more was said about it. But inside, I really hated Charles …’
‘How they tormented each other!’ said Don Bachardy who knew them, at one remove, through Christopher Isherwood, and who preferred to keep it at one remove, ‘but they were perfectly innocent that this is what they were doing.’ They had become locked into a cycle of mutual cruelty which was synonymous with being alive. ‘You must not upset me ever again,’ said Laughton triumphantly, after his heart attack, ‘it’s the old ticker.’ He evidently felt that he had scored a very high match point. He resented her apparent licence to criticize him, which, with the souring of their relations, she used indiscriminately and with the accuracy bred of a lifetime’s close observation. She was like the little bird who lives on the hippopotamus, except that instead of ridding him of insects, she was now drawing blood. Her instinct to protect him had become perverted into aggression; but the starting point was, without question, love.
They were united by certain common tastes, and by common requirements; they were divided by talent, temperament and sexual inclination. Lanchester was a lightweight, almost a flyweight, as a performer: ‘I suppose you might call what I do vaudeville,’ she wrote of herself, ‘making a joke, especially impromptu, and getting a big laugh for it, is just plain heaven.’ Once she started to work at the Turnabout Theatre in Los Angeles, and more particularly when she had Elsa Lanchester – Herself, she returned to the kind of material in which she was pre-eminent; it was a tiny kingdom of which she was queen, but it was all her own – as a sort of off-colour Joyce Grenfell, or a Bea Lillie without the genius. In between her days at the Cave of Harmony and this later incarnation, came the years as ‘Mrs Charles Laughton,’ in which she was made by Hollywood, and indeed, by Pommer and by Korda, to feel out of her husband’s league. It is not quite clear to what extent Laughton tried to promote her, but the very fact that she would need ‘promotion’ must have been unbearable to her. She later expressed her conviction that she and Charles had been driven apart by ‘professional separaters,’ and it is significant that most of the people on the list are producers. Even when Charles devised and directed her show, there seemed to be some deep-seated professional tension between them: he chose the occasion of her first touring date for Elsa Lanchester – Herself to attempt to kill himself. ‘Filled with tension and hostility and determined to break through his fit of depression, I slapped his face. Charles became silent and said simply, ‘Thank you’ … I think I said, ‘You are trying to kill my show. You want to destroy it and me. How can I possibly stand on that stage and be light and cheerful as if nothing had happened!’ Charles said s
omething like ‘Yes … maybe … I’m sorry.’ Even on the first preview itself, there had been a complicated emotional atmosphere: ‘The audience was very enthusiastic, and I took a number of curtain calls. Charles, out front, suddenly leapt from his seat and ran to the back of the auditorium and pounded on the locked door, trying to get in backstage. Finally someone let him in and Charles rushed through the stage curtains to take a bow – but by this time the audience had left … now that he saw how successful our show would be, he impulsively wanted recognition for it.’
Elsa Lanchester wrote a book, very vividly. Laughton never did. (He started to dictate his autobiography to Bruce Zortman: the notes for it – considerably more of them than Lanchester implies – are simply a series of cryptic glimpses of his early life.) The Lanchester Version is the official one. She doesn’t paint herself in angelic terms, but her every action is justified and annotated; Charles’ remain bare, without benefit of advocate.
She makes very clear, however, that there was a vast temperamental gap between them, although their differences could be said to be complementary: he with his limitless capacity for being hurt, she with her strange gift (noted from her earliest days) for the apt barb. He with his huge emotional response, for and against; she, as her cousin in a memorable burst of familial invective described her, ‘like the frostbitten Lanchesters of whom you are a fit scion’; he evasive, she blunt to a fault; he dreading thunderstorms, she loving them; his epic canvas, her miniature frame. To begin with, these differences were refreshing; with time they became a source of almost continuous aggravation on both sides, though it must be said in Elsa’s defence that she looked after him when he was dying, and it is inconceivable that he would have done the same for her. Despite several threats of divorce (originating with him, and swiftly scotched by her) there was never any serious prospect of their breaking up.