Charles Laughton Read online

  Eventually, I had gathered sufficient material to begin writing, at which point Nick Gray from Yorkshire TV called and suggested that it might be interesting to do a TV documentary as well. This was a tremendous bonus because it meant that I could reach certain people that neither a book nor a radio documentary would entice; Robert Mitchum was one of them. In the event, he chose to answer me only in monosyllables, an experience like trying to make small talk with Mount Rushmore. I guessed that a big organisation could provide better facilities for research, particularly in the celluloid sphere, and so it proved. Helen McGee, a celluloid sleuth of genius, tracked down extraordinary things, like a 1930 Movietone News sequence of Laughton making up in his dressing room at Wyndham’s as the Al Capone-like gangster Tony Perelli in his great stage hit On the Spot.

  We filmed the documentary as I was writing the book, so new discoveries could be fed from one into the other. I wrote quickly, in Scarborough, where Laughton grew up, in a hotel once owned by his brother, Tom, and having triumphantly delivered the manuscript ahead of time, I went to Los Angeles on a jaunt, taking the proofs with me. One night I found myself at some do or another, dining next to a nice chatty fellow. When I told him about the book he said, ‘Find anything interesting in the Archive at UCLA?’ I looked at him aghast, my mouth working but no words coming out. Finally I croaked, with an insouciant little laugh: ‘Archive?’ ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the Laughton archive.’ I laughed my pearly laugh again and beat a rapid retreat. The next day, I got a cab to UCLA’s leafy campus, ran into the library, and breathlessly requested the Laughton archive. As I sat in the clinical room waiting for it, cold sweat formed on my brow. The door opened and three trolleys were wheeled in containing the twenty-six boxes of the archive. A feverish and rather brutal search revealed to my almost tearful relief that twenty-five of the boxes contained screenplays that Laughton had rejected. The twenty-sixth box contained pure gold – letters from Brecht, Orson Welles, sketches for pieces he was writing, an annotated script for his stage production of John Brown’s Body. I made my notes, asked for my photocopies, and ran for dear life. I had warned my publisher, Nick Hern, then at Methuen, to hold the press; I was able to rewrite sufficiently quickly to accommodate what I had just discovered. Saved by the bell.

  The book was, for the most part, very well received. Even then, in 1987, Laughton – once a byword for great acting, universally imitated, and almost universally admired – was beginning to fade in fame, and much of what I had written came as something of a revelation to my readers; the simultaneously-released television documentary was able to show in the flesh what I had attempted to describe on the page.

  Shortly after the book appeared, I began to receive the letters every biographer half dreads and half longs for, pointing out, gently or not, solecisms of one sort or another, most of which I was able to correct in subsequent editions. One of the most remarkable of my correspondents was a then very young woman from Barcelona, Gloria Porta Abad, who evinced an unlikely passion for Laughton, and an even unlikelier persistent scholarship in matters Laughtonian which rather put my whirlwind efforts to shame. She has spent the last twenty-five years slowly unearthing deeply fascinating information about Laughton’s schooldays and his time in the trenches during the First World War, which she has written up in a fine series of articles in impeccable English; she’s even created a website with the splendidly feisty name of rootingforlaughton. Her work, and that of other isolated researchers has greatly deepened our knowledge of Laughton, and should be the basis of a new biography. But there is no sign of that on the horizon, and none of it materially alters our understanding of his acting; the new research has augmented and supplemented my findings, not, I’m relieved to say, invalidated them.

  Except in one area.

  I said at the beginning of this introduction that Laughton had faded from public consciousness, ‘as an actor, at any rate’. But that was not the end of Laughton. The most unexpected, the most improbable, thing has occurred: he has become more famous for the one film he directed than for all the once legendary performances he gave as an actor. The irony is all the richer since the failure of the film, both critically and commercially, broke his heart. The outcome of this wholly unexpected development has been a great growth of scholarship concerning The Night of the Hunter. When I was writing my book, I had access to the manuscript (now successfully published) of Preston Neal Jones’s outstanding work of oral history, Heaven and Hell to play With, which records the memories of as many participants in the film as were alive at the time of writing. I had personally spoken to the Sanders Brothers, who had been Laughton’s Second Unit directors on the film, and, however monosyllabically, to the film’s superb star, Robert Mitchum. I had of course read all the memoirs of those involved, and other interviews conducted with members of the team. Most of my information on the film – how it came about and how filming had proceeded – came from various interviews, not conducted by myself, with the film’s producer, Paul Gregory. And Gregory, a colourful character, told a vivid story, especially about James Agee’s contribution to the film. Whatever his previous triumphs, both as screenwriter (The African Queen) and as elegiast of the South (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Agee, Gregory reported – and is duly quoted by me as saying – was a hopeless drunk, who produced a grotesquely overlong screenplay that Laughton never so much as looked at, instead himself writing a version more or less overnight, which they then proceeded to shoot; Gregory added that Agee had been booted off the set by Laughton. His wholly undeserved credit nonetheless stood, because, Gregory said, they didn’t like to kick a man when he was down. In my biography, I added to this sustained vilification of Agee by crying fraud over the fact that Laughton’s screenplay was later, posthumously, ‘good enough,’ as I said, ‘to have been passed off for years (in Five Film Scripts by James Agee) as the work of a seasoned genius.’ The original screenplay had long ago disappeared.

  Some years after Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor came out, I was asked by the BFI to write a monograph on The Night of the Hunter, and in preparation, I took stock of the latest research, by Jones and others. Various perfectly lucid memos from Agee had come to light which suggested that whatever he might have done in his spare time, he was far from drunk on the job, that Laughton seemed to respect him at all times, that he himself sought to share his credit with Laughton for the latter’s contribution to the screenplay, that he remained on the payroll for the full five weeks during which he undertook re-writes, and that he took a keen interest in the editing of the film. I assimilated all this material into a revised view of Agee’s contribution, but in the absence of the original screenplay, I concluded that nonetheless Laughton was substantially responsible for the script as filmed. The book duly came out to appreciative murmurings in the world of Film Studies. Then, a couple of months after publication, I received two letters within a very short space of time. One was from Paul Gregory, who, to my embarrassment, I had thought had gone to the great cutting room in the sky. When I had been doing the research for Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, I was told that after the death of his wife, Janet Gaynor, he had withdrawn to Palm Springs to raise squabs, and was incommunicado. His letter thanked me for the book, for its balance and accuracy, and hoped that we might meet one day.

  The other was from the James Agee estate asking me whether I’d like to read the original screenplay. A couple of months later, I was in Los Angeles, and visited Gregory, but not before I had received and read Agee’s screenplay. I discovered that despite a great deal of elaboration of incidents and characters in the novel characteristic of most first drafts, the original screenplay, with its six-section structure, was quite clearly the basis of the film as it was shot, with certain curtailments and excisions, certain condensations and extrapolations, of a kind that every director makes, either during pre-production on the set, during filming, or afterwards during the editing process. Clearly Laughton was the governing spirit in the making of the film, but the nuts and bol
ts of the writing of the screenplay were put in place by James Agee. All of this is brilliantly described in Jeff Couchman’s book Credit Where Credits are Due, which any The Night of the Hunter enthusiast should eagerly seek out. In my long and very frisky meeting with Gregory at Palm Springs, I gently suggested that all this new evidence pointed to a very different story to the one he had told; he brushed the idea aside. Short of bringing him the original screenplay and taking him through it page by page, it is hard to know what would have convinced him to change his story. Why it was so important to him to demonise Agee and exalt Laughton, with whom his relationship, always difficult, eventually foundered beyond the point of no return, is a matter for conjecture. It is equally baffling to know why he – and Robert Mitchum – always insisted that Laughton loathed the child actors in the film (particularly Billy Chapin, who so brilliantly plays John in the film) and preferred not to work with them, leaving it to Mitchum to direct them. Grave doubt was cast on this version of events by another remarkable development in The Night of the Hunter studies, Robert Gitt’s discovery and restoration of the rushes of the film, including many sequences where the camera had been left running after Laughton had called ‘Cut’ and gone to work with the actors before the next take. Laughton is shown as charming, affectionate, and playful with the children, now and then becoming quite strict with them – just as he is, in fact, with all the actors. A selection of these fascinating and moving examples of his directorial approach can be seen on the newly-issued Criterion edition of The Night of the Hunter.

  Apart from these two matters, the writing of the screenplay and Laughton’s approach to the actors, especially the young ones, I am pleased and relieved to find on re-reading the book that it accurately tells the story of what I conceive to be Laughton’s heroic life in acting. It seems to me to be a story worth telling, both in an exemplary sense and because he was an altogether uncommon human being. I was surprised, this time round, at how central Laughton’s homosexuality was to his work. It is a highly debatable question as to whether the torture that he underwent as a gay man, terrified of exposure and filled with loathing for himself, was an essential component of his art, but on a simple human level, it is cheering to see him making peace with himself at last, able finally to share in the (relatively) uncomplicated experience of loving and being loved by another. Great creativity can spring from anywhere, it seems: from profound alienation, but equally from a deep sense of personal equilibrium. Whatever its source, Charles Laughton’s creative imagination was of the order of the greatest painters, poets, playwrights, architects. Such individuals come rarely, and we should cherish and try to learn from them. Actors’ work is to a large degree – especially that of stage actors, of course – written on sand. Laughton made over fifty films, each one of which contains a performance which to a greater or a lesser degree represents his extraordinary vision; scandalously, only a fraction of them is available on DVD, but they can and should be tracked down. There is nothing like them. My purpose in writing this biography was to try to discover the conditions that allowed him to create such work. I hope that it still serves that purpose.

  Simon Callow

  Mexico City 2012

  Life with a capital ‘L’

  When I was a child all the grown-ups around me had a joke, that is to say, all the women grown-ups. If we passed a pair of lovers spooning on a park bench my mother would look significantly at my Aunt Winnie – and Aunt Winnie would say, ‘Life with a capital “L”’, and they would both laugh secretly and I would feel uncomfortable.

  If we passed a gaudy lady on the street my Aunt would look significantly at my mother and my mother would say, ‘Life, etc.’, and they would both laugh and I would look at the lady and my mother would say, ‘Don’t look, Charlie. She’s a theatrical!’

  I remember the incident because the gaudy lady was dressed in white, with a white parasol and pink roses on her hat, and my mother nearly yanked an arm out of its socket and I became an actor.

  I suppose by now you’ve got the idea.

  Charles Laughton Tell Me a Story

  PART ONE

  Origins

  CHARLES LAUGHTON WAS born on 1 July, 1899, in the Victoria Hotel, Scarborough, of which his parents, Robert and Elizabeth, were proprietors.

  Thus he just managed to squeeze into the nineteenth century, in whose shadow he lived most of his life. Certain other facts contained in the bald sentence above determined his being in the world. He was a Yorkshireman – a breed whose characteristic behaviour can easily be misinterpreted; and he was of tradesman stock. He was, indeed, for the first 25 years of his life, a hotelier – which proved excellent preparation for some of his subsequent ventures.

  The Victoria Hotel, small for a hotel, splendid for a bed and breakfast establishment, is smack opposite the station – an ideal location, perfectly convenient if not absolutely salubrious. The Laughtons were kept busy; so busy that Charles and his brothers Tom and Frank can have seen little of them, even before the children were sent away to their several strict Catholic schools (Mrs Laughton, of Irish farming stock, was fiercely Catholic). The boys were left in the charge of various members of staff. A snug little hotel like the Victoria (it’s still thriving today, with an emblem of Henry VIII as Charles Laughton adorning the outside) offered a thousand crannies for a neglected child to play in; and Charles found them all. Characteristically, he found an audience too: a chambermaid discovered trapped in the linen cupboard, while Charles, swathed in sheets, declaimed. It is said that she was perfectly happy to be ensconced with the infant Roscius in this way, giving a preview of his performance in Spartacus some sixty years later.

  Outside the hotel was a bustling and attractive world for the boys, but especially the boy with the passion for performance. Minutes away are the beach and the famous spa with all its attendant amusements. Both England and Scarborough were at their Edwardian apogee, supremely self-confident and prosperous and structured. The demotic explosion of the twenties and thirties had not yet occurred, and the pictures of the period reveal a Scarborough still a spa, not yet a resort. So Master Charles and Master Tom and Master Frank would be taken by someone (not Mother or Father, to be sure) to mingle with the other young ladies and gentlemen a way off from the urchins beloved of Whitby’s photographer-laureate, Frank Sutcliffe. Any desire to join them, like them to roll one’s trousers up, or indeed rip one’s clothes off altogether, would have been diverted by the arrival of the Punch and Judy Man, or the Fol-de-Rols, or the Pierrots on their little rigged-up stage. Head swirling with any of these, he could have gone on to the Mirrorama; or the Spa’s theatre; or the bioscope; or the pleasure garden. What ordinary children crammed into two weeks, was perennial for him.

  ‘“Scarborough the Splendid” is the style that has lately been suggested for this Brighton of the North, in lieu of that title Queen of Watering-Places which it seems to usurp from its Sussex rival’, claims A. & C. Black’s Guide of 1899. Shamelessly it continues: ‘The nearest summary of it that we can give is as a union of Dover and Folkestone, on an enlarged scale, with a dash of Ramsgate, a touch of Tenby, a soupçon of Trouville translated into Yorkshire, at times, to tell the whole truth, a whiff of the North Pole; and then,’ it sums up, ‘there remains something peculiarly its own.’

  In this demi-paradise Charles remained until his thirteenth year, in and out of the linen cupboard, one can only presume. That linen cupboard had become much, much bigger when, in 1908, the Laughtons, having made a brilliant success of the Victoria, first as managers, then as tenants, took over the splendid Pavilion Hotel, only a stone’s throw away from the Victoria on the other flank of the station, but another world from that cosy little commercial travellers’ hostelry. Built, according to Osbert Sitwell, who watched the Diamond Jubilee shindigs from its balcony, in the ‘Luxembourg late-Renaissance style’, its brochure boasted of 130 rooms, electric light and bells throughout, and magnificent suites of private apartments and public rooms. ‘The Entrance Hall, Corrid
ors and Lounge are spacious, and all the rooms lofty and well-ventilated, with Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Lavatories and Bathrooms on every floor. The sanitary arrangements are perfect.’ They had acquired this palace only thanks to the unremitting drive of Mrs Laughton, tough, proud, determined. Her husband, Robert, was carried amiably along in her wake. His special sphere was the catering, and he was known as the shrewdest man in the county when it came to a leg of mutton or a pound of greens. Up at five every morning to scour the market, he then generally withdrew from the running of the hotel, to pursue the more congenial activities of fishing and shooting. Either way, the brothers Charles, Frank and Tom, had to make do with surrogate parents chosen from among the myriad downstairs employees of the great enterprise: the maids and the bell-boys and the receptionists and the bootblacks.

  The absence of intimate relationship with parents is notorious for the encouragement of two species, actors and homosexuals. One of the sons – Charles – was both; another, Frank, was homosexual. Tom, by contrast, was much married, and never set foot on any stage.

  Robert’s widowed sister Mary fulfilled some parental functions, and she and Charles shared and indulged botanical passions which never left him all his life. They would roam the Moors together, naming the plants and trees and birds. He was lucky to find an ally in these passions. It was a morbid and unmanly occupation according to prevailing mores, and the sort of thing that led his mother, when she could spare the time from the accounts and dreams of expansion, to describe Charles severely as ‘artistic’. Episodes in the linen cupboard and altogether too much time spent with his head in books (not ledgers) were further indications of this unnatural inclination.