Charles Laughton Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Simon Callow

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Preface

  Life with a Capital ‘L’

  PART ONE

  Origins

  First work

  West End Star

  Broadway and Hollywood

  London Again

  Old Vic

  Hollywood Again

  Korda Again

  Crisis

  Mayflower

  The Hunchback

  PART TWO

  Change of Life

  Routine

  Brecht

  Galileo

  Teaching

  New Life

  Almost Legitimate Again

  Shakespeare

  Last Work

  Coda

  Peroration

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Appendices

  Reading in Alaska

  The Plays

  The Films

  The Discs

  Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The creator of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Henry VIII and Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton’s career spans 50 films and 40 stage roles. This entralling biography follows him from his parents’ hotel in Scarborough to his climactic assumption of the role of King Lear in Statford at the end of his life. Along the way we meet a galaxy of Hollywood greats – from Korda, Hitchcock and Billy WIlder to Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. We also discover a hugely talented and complex man – a legend in his own lifetime who nonetheless counted himself a failure.

  About the Author

  Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared on the stage and in many films, including the hugely popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. His books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, Love is Where it Falls, the first two volumes of his three-volume life of Orson Welles, his theatrical memoir My Life in Pieces, and, most recently, the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.

  Also by Simon Callow

  Being an Actor

  Shooting the Actor

  Love is Where it Falls

  Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

  Orson Welles: Hello Americans

  My Life in Pieces

  Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

  List of Illustrations

  1. An advertisement for the Pavilion Hotel, Scarborough, during the Laughtons’ tenure.

  2. Laughton in November 1928 at the time of Pickwick. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  3. Charles and Elsa in February 1929. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  4. Laughton as Hercule Poirot in Alibi, 1931. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  5. On the Spot by Edgar Wallace, 1931, with Laughton and Gillian Lind. (Photo of Laughton: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  6. Charles, Elsa and Mr J. C. Graham, European head of Paramount, at a luncheon to launch The Sign of the Cross, January 1933. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  7. Charles (and brand new Armstrong-Siddeley) outside the Old Vic in October 1933. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  8. The two faces of Henry VIII. Old Vic souvenir programme showing stage version. London films publicity photo showing screen version.

  9. Early films. Piccadilly, 1929. The Devil and the Deep, 1932. If I Had a Million, 1932. Island of Lost Souls, 1933.

  10. The Importance of Being Earnest, Old Vic, 1934, with Laughton as Chasuble and Lanchester as Miss Prism.

  11. ‘Laughton bestrides the Atlantic’, a fantasy by Sherriffs from the Sketch of 20 February 1935, showing Laughton with puppets of his most famous roles to date: (l. to r.) Nero; Henry VIII; the Murderer in Payment Deferred; and Moulton-Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

  12. Charles at Waterloo Station leaving for Hollywood and arriving (with Elsa), March 1935. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  13. Laughton as Rembrandt (1936) on the front of Picturegoer.

  14. Preparing Jamaica Inn: Charles lunching with fellow-actors in November 1938, and with J. B. Priestley (left: screenwriter) and Erich Pommer (centre: producer), in December 1938. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  15. Laughton and Vivien Leigh in St Martin’s Lane, 1938, on the front cover of Picturegoer.

  16. A spread from Film Weekly, February 1938.

  17. Hollywood. Les Miserables, 1935. Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939. They Knew What They Wanted, 1940.

  18. Laughton as Captain Hook, 1936 (from The Sketch, 30.12.36)

  19. A hand-made collage by Bertolt Brecht serving as the front cover of a collection of poems he gave to Charles for Christmas 1945 or 1946. The inscription in Brecht’s hand reads: ‘Playwright Brecht Humbly Submits Some of His Subversive Thoughts to the Most Honorable Laughton.’ (Photo: James K. Lyon)

  20. Don Juan in Hell, 1951. Laughton and Agnes Moorehead. (BBC Hulton Picture Library)

  21. Laughton briefly encounters Marilyn Monroe in O. Henry’s Full House, 1952

  22. Laughton and, right, Henry Daniell in Witness for the Prosecution, 1957.

  23. Members of the Stratford company, 1959: (l. to r.) Laughton, Leslie Caron, Peter Hall, Angela Baddeley, Paul Robeson, Mary Ure, Edith Evans, Glen Byam Shaw (on stairs), Harry Andrews, Laurence Olivier. (Photo: Roger Wood)

  24. Laughton as Lear and Bottom, 1959. (Photos: Angus McBean)

  25. Laughton and Albert Finney in The Party, 1958. (Photo: Zoe Dominic)

  26. The late films. The Paradine Case, 1948. The Bribe, 1949. Night of the Hunter (Laughton directing Lillian Gish), 1952. Advise and Consent, 1962.

  This book is for Aziz Yehia (1950–84).

  His love of film, and my love of him

  made the book possible

  in memoriam A.

  Animula vagula blandula,

  Hospes comesque corporis,

  Quae nunc abibis in loca,

  Pallidula rigida nudula,

  Nec ut soles dabis jocos?

  Emperor Hadrian

  Gentle little wandering breath,

  Of the body friend and guest,

  Where now must you look for rest,

  Pale and naked, hard as death,

  Lost without your power to jest?

  tr. Stephen Oliver

  SIMON CALLOW

  Charles Laughton

  A Difficult Actor

  Introduction

  The starting point of this book was my realisation that I was not, after all, Charles Laughton. This useful discovery was made during the extremely brief run of On the Spot, in which I was involved some summers ago in London, and it led me to ask who he was and what was the nature of his talent. Two years of research revealed to me much more than I had bargained for, a giant and a hero of acting, who had pushed it further and deeper than any actor of our century. His relation to acting was complex and led him to withdraw from it into other, less all-consuming means of expression. I tried to follow him there too.

  Charles Laughton was a ‘difficult’ actor, not only because he was not easy to work with, but also in the sense that some books, some paintings, are said to be ‘difficult’: they require close attention, they are not what, at first sight, they may appear to be. This book is a sustained attempt to write about acting, as exemplified by one of its greatest practitioners. It is an enquiry into what he was trying to do and how far he succeeded in doing it. It tries to discover what kind of an artist he was. It considers the question of whether it is possible to talk about acting as an art at
all. His life was in many ways extraordinary, but the body of the book is concerned with it only in relation to his acting. The central account of his output, his oeuvre, is flanked on either side by chapters which attempt respectively to show something of where he and his acting came from (‘Origins’) and to understand his emotional life (‘Coda’).

  In between is a saga of the heroic struggle of a great artist to transcend the complexities of his temperament and accomplish the enormous tasks he set himself.

  New Preface, 2012

  It is twenty-five years since I wrote this book. There have been no subsequent biographies of Laughton. Indeed, I’m sad to say that Laughton – as an actor, at any rate – has increasingly slipped out of public consciousness. And not only that: even within his own profession, he is virtually unknown to anyone under the age of forty. A few years ago while I was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company I took an informal straw poll of my fellow actors: mention of his name to anyone not yet middle-aged drew a complete blank. This is tragic, in my view. We actors need our heroes, our models; we need to know what has been achieved – what can be achieved. And Laughton was one of the handful of actors in the last century – among them Mikhail Chekov, Nikolai Cherkasov, Greta Garbo, Louis Jouvet, Marlon Brando – who extended the possibilities of acting, expanding its vocabulary and reaching new heights of expressiveness. He was a great original, but he was not a one-off, like Katharine Hepburn, or Michael Caine, whom it is possible to imitate, but from whom it is not possible to learn. His approach to acting, and his ambition for it, remain a constant inspiration. He was that rare thing, the actor as artist. This idea was the theme of my book.

  It was my first biography. As the author of a biography of Orson Welles which is – I hope I may say without appearing to blow my own trumpet – a genuine work of scholarship, I would now prefer to describe Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor as a biographical study, like my books about Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens. It was Laughton’s acting, as I explain in the Introduction, that I was interested in, and I concerned myself with the life only insofar as it illuminated the acting. I wrote it for the best of all possible motives for writing a book: because there was nothing in existence that could tell me what I wanted to know about Laughton’s acting, how he worked, how he thought. Elsa Lanchester’s early biography of him, while not without charm, was whimsical in tone and, because she could not be honest about the complexities of being married to a homosexual husband, inclined to glide over the surface. Her autobiography – Elsa Lanchester Herself – was written after Laughton’s death and was essentially concerned with their personal relationship, enabling her to settle many scores and repay many ancient grudges. The next book about Laughton to appear was Charles Higham’s biography, written at the prompting of Lanchester, who was intent on further revenging herself on her late husband; Higham later told me hair-raising stories about how she had set private detectives onto Laughton as he pursued his sex life, and expected the biographer to print the photographs they had taken of him with – often quite literally – his pants down. The only other biography, by Kurt Singer, a Hollywood press rep, was a wretched piece of hackwork, cobbled together from newspaper cuttings and, worse, press releases.

  None of them had anything to say about his acting. This, of course, was and is generally true of actors’ biographies. In a sense, in writing about Laughton, I was on a mission; it was part of an ongoing project to find a way of writing about acting. My first book, Being an Actor, was about the actor as Everyman, and attempted to delineate the common experience of actors by looking at the professional experience of one average young actor – me. In Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, by contrast, I set out to look at the work of a genius of acting, to see what heights might be scaled and what the conditions were for that sort of greatness. I took issue with actors’ biographies that concerned themselves only with their subjects’ careers or with the occupants of their beds. I read them, of course, and not necessarily without pleasure. My objection to them was simply that they contributed nothing to an understanding of acting as either craft or art. The best book I know about any actor as an artist is Parker Tyler’s Chaplin: Last of the Clowns, and I tried to model myself on him, hoping to emulate something of his searching analysis and his hyper-sensitive openness to the resonances in his subject’s work. (I would like to have imitated his deliciously fancy-pants prose, too, but wisely refrained). Another influence was Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great, which eschews any attempt at novelish continuity or authorial omniscience, instead constantly stopping the flow to ask: what does such and such a bare fact mean? What is its context? In doing so, Fox opens doors on history which no seamless narrative could hope for.

  Those were my models. Actually doing the work was something else. I had written Being an Actor at high speed, having brooded on the material for several years, and I cracked on with Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor with similarly determined energy, while pursuing my various day jobs, acting and directing. I scarcely knew where to start; writing about oneself is easy, of course, requiring very little research. This was different. I knew nothing about where to go, what to look for, how to take notes. Admittedly, I had help: the publisher provided me with a hundred man-hours of research. The agreeable and very thorough Canadian who did the work found the cast list and credits of every picture and play Laughton had ever been involved in, marked those people who were still living in one colour ink, those who had written books in another. Then he located as many reviews as he could find; after that it was over to me. In fact, I quickly discovered that though my researcher’s work was impeccable, I had to do it all over again, because it is what you see in the adjacent column to the one you’re supposed to be looking at that offers the real illumination. So, under my own steam now, I read every word anybody had ever written about Laughton; I read every play he’d ever performed; I saw, as often as not on a Steenbeck editing console at the BFI, every film he’d ever made. I even tracked down every original source from which any of the films had been drawn.

  I sought out and spoke to anyone I could locate in the British Isles who had known him. Then I went to America; Laughton had lived half of his adult life there. I had a clutch of introductions and – which I was sure would impress any potential interviewees – the imprimatur of the BBC, who had asked me to make a radio documentary for them. I went out and bought the most expensive state-of-the art recorder I could find, and sometimes it actually worked, though not too well, alas, when I spoke to Billy Wilder. I was so awed to find myself eating bagels with the director of Sunset Boulevard and Some Like it Hot that I never plucked up the courage to ask him to stop swivelling round in his chair like that and could he possibly close the window? But he had astonishing things to say, peppered with vintage wisecracks; his unreserved enthusiasm for Laughton was thrilling to hear, as was his certainty that not only was he a great actor but a great intellect, too: ‘He was a Renaissance man,’ Wilder told me, which was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  I interviewed over fifty people on both sides of the Atlantic, and learned to develop photographic hearing for the times (one out of two) when the tape recorder failed me. If it wasn’t batteries, it was the mike; if it wasn’t the mike, it was the tape; and if it was neither of those, I’d just forget to switch the thing on. On one occasion everything was perfect, bar one tiny detail: I’d left the microphone at home. I pretended that there was a built-in microphone, and switched on regardless, even checking the batteries at periodic intervals. I spoke to a huge range of people, some famous, some not. I spoke to Stewart Granger (‘To know Charles was NOT to love him’); to Belita, the ice-skater whom Laughton had taken under his wing when she tried to become an actress, and who said he was ‘the sexiest man alive’; to Benita Armstrong, who had seen me on a television programme talking about writing the book, and who invited me to tea to talk about her late husband John who had designed Laughton’s season at the Old Vic and his flat in Bloomsbury. I had a chimerical telephonic rela
tionship with an infinitely gracious and amusing Deanna Durbin, in retirement in Neauphle-le-Château, who, over three long conversations touching on many subjects, absolutely and totally refused to say a word about Laughton. I discovered the value of recommendations: it was Vincent Price (‘eating with Charles was a carnal experience’) who had put me onto Deanna Durbin, and Clare Bloom gave me Christopher Isherwood’s number, but he didn’t want to talk to me about Laughton either. He died not long afterwards, and I realise now that he had no desire to talk about someone who had died of the same disease that was at that moment killing him. A year later I phoned Isherwood’s partner, Don Bachardy, to see whether he might have something to tell me. He too declined, saying that ‘Charles was an enthusiasm of Chris’s that I didn’t share’. Instead, he said, would I care to let him draw my portrait? When he’d finished, he showed me the drawing: it was an extraordinary thing, half me and half Laughton. Showing it to me somehow released him to talk about Laughton: and what he said provided me with some of the most acute insights into the man and his acting of anyone I spoke to.

  I managed to unearth the last few survivors of Laughton’s family. Two female cousins with whom he had been brought up in Scarborough now lived together in London. I had been warned in advance that one was manic-depressive and that the other had recently had an unreliable set of dentures installed. On cue, the younger of the two started out vivaciously but quickly slithered into gloom and finally deep silence, while the other talked wittily and sharply about Laughton as a boy, but to a castanet obligato from the new gnashers. The sisters put me onto his brother Tom’s widow, who thrilled me by telling me that she had a tape of a family gathering at one of Charles’s visits back home on which occasion not only Charles but both his brothers and his mother spoke. When we sat down to listen to it, nothing but a soft hiss came out of the speakers. She had played it that morning, she wailed, and it had been fine; she had presumably pressed the record button while playing it back. Meanwhile, her new husband, a Scottish doctor, helpfully informed me that Laughton was sexually insatiable: ‘He was homosexual, you see, and your homosexual is invariably promiscuous: it’s in his nature.’