Charles Laughton Read online

  It is hard to ascribe any emotion at all to the bonny inscrutability of the child Charles as seen in photographs. But he certainly sticks out. His eyes confront the lens with rare force, a tough little tot, no charmer, on this evidence, but determined.

  In a striking section of her first book, Charles Laughton and I, Elsa Lanchester quotes, with breathtaking but, one comes to find, characteristic insensitivity (or is it?), a letter from a contemporary of Charles’, in which he says: ‘He was the kind of boy one longed to take a good kick at.’ Nothing in Charles’ young face explains such a reaction so, allowing for early undifferentiated teenage barbarism, it must or might have been something in Charles’ manner which provoked the hearty young gentleman’s aggression: he was not sportif, he read books, he was tubby (not exactly fat). Cause enough. But if, in addition, he lacked the gift of invisibility, then he would seem to be reproaching his fellow students. If, despite his panic and fear, he couldn’t quite suppress his personality, as he certainly couldn’t in the family photographs – well, then he was really for it.

  Charles’ first steps in education were at an unremarkable local preparatory school – Catholic, of course; then at a French convent in nearby Filey, where he learnt perfect French; finally at Stonyhurst, whose forbidding name was wholly borne out by its regime of chilly austerity and mechanical instruction, reinforced by the tawse and the threat of eternal damnation. In an image of refined horror entirely characteristic of the Jesuits, Charles and his fellow thirteen-year-olds were informed that eternity was ‘as if this world were a steel globe and every thousand years a bird’s wing brushed past that globe – and the time it would take for that globe to wear away is all eternity.’

  Whatever effect it may have on the soul, Catholicism (and its English variant) is another great manufactory of actors (and homosexuals, up to a point: though more homosexuals seem to be drawn to the church than are created by it). Ritual is obviously a contributing factor – incense, vestments, chanting, processing, the division between the altar and the congregation – all these find their counterpart in the theatre; but the drama of its imaginative framework – the opposition of heaven and hell, the great figures of the Trinity and the omnipresence of Mary in her many guises, the vast supernumerary cast – archangels, angels, seraphim, cherubim and so on; all are the stuff of drama. More obscurely, but no less certainly dramatic, is the cycle of sin, retribution and redemption.

  And the Jesuits are sure as hell your men for putting it over. For Charles, whatever the positive gains in feeding his imagination, it instilled a lifelong guilt deep in his breast – a guilt which easily attached itself to his desire to make love to men, but which was in fact a more general guilt: a sense of not being right in the world, of not deserving what the world has to offer. It was the bane of his life.

  Or perhaps it was his making.

  He showed no great scholastic gifts: he won a couple of class prizes; one for English, and another for Latin Verse. His strongest suit was maths, which might have pleased his mother. She paid the college anxious visits from time to time to determine the direction of her son’s talents, but nothing insisted. The only occasion during his time at Stonyhurst that he stood out from the crowd was something she’d probably rather not have known about: the school play. When he was fourteen he made his only appearance, in a Charles Hawtrey vehicle, The Private Secretary. Was his casting a subtle form of the snobbery under which he smarted throughout his time at public school?: – he was playing Mr Stead, a lodging-house keeper. ‘We were greatly taken by his acting … his part was far too short; we wanted more of him for it seemed to suit him excellently.’ He sat and passed his School Certificate in July of 1915, and then left.

  There had been talk of a naval career for him, but despite the influence of a certain Uncle Charles, he failed to qualify for a life at sea, and so, inevitably, if reluctantly, he began to assume the mantle of eldest son and heir to the business. Eliza Laughton’s ambition had transformed the Pavilion’s clientele; it began to be fashionable. The Sitwells stayed there while waiting for their house to be decorated, and other county families soon followed their lead. Eliza herself had long left behind the actual physical running of the hotel (though Eric Fenby, a Scarborian and contemporary of Tom and Charles, notes that she was never above ‘tweaking’ the bills). She had made herself chief executive, and was the visible and formidable figurehead of the enterprise. Every year she would spend a month in London, assembling her wardrobe, in which she would then, night after night, appear on the stroke of seven, dazzling Scarborough from her commanding position at the top of the foyer stairs. The little Irish barmaid had developed into a matriarch, a grande dame, a queen, as Fenby puts it. She was a holy terror to her staff and her family, missing nothing with her all-seeing eyes, and quick to give expression to any fault she might find. She was also generous, and kindly, but human warmth was not her leading quality. As befits a holy terror, she spent every spare moment on her knees in prayer. The working day was punctuated with visits to church, tellings of the rosary, contemplation of the missal. Charles, who loved and feared her in equal measure, was always nervous in her presence.

  Robert Laughton drifted further and further away from the centre of things, spending as much time as he possibly could at the little farmhouse they owned at Lockton, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. Mrs Laughton would repair there for afternoon prayers, but their paths rarely crossed.

  It must have been a great joy to Charles to discover that Eliza’s training programme for him involved working at the very bottom of the ladder in a London hotel – not only wonderful to be going to the big city, but wonderful not to be under so much unrelenting pressure. It was not comfortable, either, being a Laughton in Scarborough. ‘They were loathed,’ says Eric Fenby. The town resented Eliza’s upward mobility, her piety and her grandeur. Both Tom and Charles, in order to escape the taint of her queenly ways, would try to slum it sartorially; at about this point, Charles seems to have lost interest in washing, a taste he never really recovered.

  He was pleased, too, to escape some of the hotel’s clientele: Tom Laughton wrote, ‘Charles liked people generally, but he was allergic to the establishment. Charles had no use for the pretensions of the so-called county set. It was something that, as a family, we came across in the business of the hotel, and Charles always reacted against it.’ This experience, and the experience of being patronised by schoolboy snobs at Stonyhurst, radicalised him. He never became a socialist, but he was vigorously anti-snob; he couldn’t stand toffs, and he always longed to be one of ‘the ordinary people’.

  The London hotel was Claridge’s; and there Charles spent a couple of happy years. He made friends with his fellow-employees; he had free rein to observe (which was the only thing he really enjoyed about hotelling); and above all there was the theatre.

  The wartime metropolis offered an altogether superior class of fol-de-rols to any he’d encountered up North. Chu-Chin-Chow became his passion; that and the acting of Gerald du Maurier, who startled his contemporaries with his throwaway technique, his audacious silent scenes and his spell-binding relaxation of manner. His performances made other actors seem heavy-handed. He seems a surprising influence until one examines Laughton’s work more closely. Time and again, one is taken aback by the delicacy and, yes, the underplayed nature of what he’s doing. That’s du Maurier’s legacy.

  Claridge’s was a hotel much frequented by the stars, and Laughton could observe them at close range. What would not have been lost on him was that he resembled none of them. He was reasonably tall – 5 feet 10½ inches according to his press handouts – though somewhat round-shouldered; plump going on tubby; and possessed of a face that he was wont to describe as like an elephant’s behind, or ‘just a pudding’, a concatenation of striking features set somewhat randomly in an undifferentiated globe of a face, topped by not easily controlled light brown hair. The ever-mobile eyes tended towards cunning and/or concealment, the irregular nose, bulbous towards its e
nd, and the full fleshy lips, are almost indecently powerful. There’s something about the face, in its latent state, that makes you uneasy; and the owner of the face seems to be wearing it uneasily, too, as if it had been moulded on him. What perhaps neither he nor anyone else knew at the time was that it was a uniquely expressive mask, capable of rearranging itself at will, of reflecting the tiniest shifts of thought, of appearing startlingly ugly or overwhelmingly radiant.

  It was the face, neither of a character-man (quirky, rugged, or whatever other dominant quality), nor, patently, of a leading actor. It was the face of someone who simply shouldn’t be an actor at all. And there was nothing that could be done about it. No plucking of eyebrows, no altering of hairline, no straightening of teeth, by means of all of which Laurence Olivier, at nearly the same period, transformed his unruly features into an acceptable beauty, would transform this indeterminately expressive mug. Only inner conviction could do this.

  Between the glorious spectacles on the stage and the scarcely more real life of a luxury hotel, the war must have seemed very distant, a rumour. It had staggered bloodily on for the last four years. By 1918, any delusions of glory had long since evaporated. The war was simply an insatiable leviathan which must be fed with increasingly young flesh. Returning to Scarborough, the eighteen-year-old Laughton signed up, not with the commission to which his education and class entitled him, but as a private. He didn’t feel up to commanding, he said. The Royal Huntingdonshire Rifles were posted to Vimy Ridge, and the fat, sensitive boy found himself translated to the trenches, there to freeze and to starve, and on occasion, to stab eighteen-year-old Germans to death with a bayonet. He endured a year of this till Armistice; in the very last week of the war he was gassed. This parting absurdity brought him out in severe rashes on his back, which recurred throughout his life, and damaged his larynx and trachea.

  His letters from the front (the very few that have survived) are boyish and extravagant in tone and mostly concern food, (‘I tell you what I would like in a small parcel by itself. 1lb. of Greenlay’s sausages, a little greece [sic] to cook them in, also one of those Tommy’s cookers to cook them on. But you know big parcels are worse than useless because if you get a sudden notice to move you have to leave stuff behind.’) They are written to Hepsebiah Thompson, the receptionist at the Pavilion, for whom Laughton obviously had great fondness (‘Well, Miss Thompson, I am getting bleary-eyed so I fain would bid thee au revoir. So I remain forever your little toddler of bygone days Charlie. P.S. “Do it again, Mith Thomthon.”’) There are sharp glimpses of conditions: ‘Please excuse the grubbiness of this letter because just as I was writing that last bit we had an order to pack up and had to make another move. Oh my word the mosquitoes and the other animals nearly drive me crazy … owing to the lack of a better projectile, I hurled your pot egg at a rat which was in the act of making off with one of my pal’s soaps. R.I.P. Those blighted rats will take anything from paper to oil bottles. What they do with them goodness only knows’, and typical anxiety about pleasing his mother: ‘What does mother think of my letters? Do you think I could say more of some things and less of others or in fact change them to the good in any way?’

  ‘Well, Pompo old thing,’ he writes, ‘you know your letters are always like a sea-breeze I can tell you … you always tell me something I like e.g. theatres, a subject which seems to be studiously avoided by everyone else who writes to me.’ There is one line in these letters which resounds deeply and darkly, though: ‘My one fear as regards this do is that it might knock the fun out of me.’

  The lad in uniform who returned to Scarborough in 1919 certainly had a grim set to his features, as revealed in his homecoming photograph. Nor could he particularly expect a hero’s welcome; his situation was too common. What was expected was a brisk return to business as usual. For six months, though, the boy that was remembered by everyone at home as being lively and fun would lock himself in his room for hours on end. He said, ‘I’m no use to anyone like this.’ The worst passed, but he was never as long as he lived altogether to escape the darkness he brought back with him. Soon enough, however, he resumed his duties in the hotel – now more significant because his father was ill (diabetes) and he must take his place at the head of things.

  He consoled himself for this unwanted succession by joining one of the many local amateur groups, the Scarborough Players, and with them he played all kinds of unsuitable but no doubt highly enjoyable parts: Sir William Gower, in Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ for example; the photograph shows a very striking transformation; it’s definitely someone staring balefully at us; whether it is Sir William precisely is, in this context, neither here nor there. He had a great triumph in the last play he did for the amateurs, Hobson’s Choice, in which he gave his Willie Mossop; the local press most interestingly described his performance as

  ranking with the best examples of character portrayal – it was this interesting nonentity that Mr Laughton presented in such a compelling way that the audience watched the poor creature – such easy prey to a woman grasping at a last chance, that they pitied him – which was really the highest form of admiration. Mr Laughton’s study of the evolution of the dullard was a splendid effort of the actor’s art.

  The Scarborough Mercury’s reviewer had hit the nail on the head. By this time, he was actually running the Players; Mollie Decker, his cousin, who was living with the Laughtons, recalls that the set was entirely furnished from the hotel, which was quite denuded.

  In addition, he threw himself into the management of the Pavilion. Not into the day-to-day business of it; nor into the catering, or the service aspects of it. What interested him was the appearance of it, the production of it, one might almost say. He completely redecorated the interior; he hung paintings throughout; he installed a new bar; he brought a band in; he commissioned leaflets from local artists. His stupendous energies, such as were left over from the Players, were engaged, and when that happened, Charles Laughton was always unstoppable.

  In 1922, Osbert Sitwell would stroll over to the Pavilion for meals: ‘one evening, a rather substantial young man, a son of the house, came up to me from behind the desk in his office, and enquired if I would like him to show me the improvements that had been recently effected in the hotel … As he took me round, I noticed how marked a personality he possessed; moreover, in spite of an appearance entirely opposed to a conception of him as a sleek young foreigner in a tail-coat, he was so much the sleek young hotel director that it scarcely rang true, and made it seem as though he were giving an interpretation of the part … this was Charles Laughton.’

  There was a limit to the run of even such a good part as that, and Laughton, now twenty-four years old, an advanced age for a young man yearning for the stage, determined to get a training. The outrage in the family circle was immense, only softened by paternal blessing. Robert Laughton, that genial gent, who was soon to die, was of the opinion that nothing would deflect Charles. The next in line for the succession, Tom, was summoned from the farm where he was learning his trade, and agreed to hold the fort.

  ‘I shall never come back home to the business, Tom; I would starve in the gutter first,’ Charles told Tom. Just as well; any less passion, and he’d never make it. Fortunately, he had more than mere passion: he had practical passion.

  He was no naïve stage-struck youth when he made his application to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He’d run a medium large hotel for several years, had command and responsibility. He may not have enjoyed the business side of the operation, but he did it – balanced the books, hired people and fired them. A hotel, moreover, is in many respects like a theatre: there’s a backstage and an auditorium, the mechanics of the thing are supposed to be invisible, there are costumes and performances. Charles had managed his hotel just as if it were a theatre, and he had done so with some flair. In many ways it was an ideal preparation.

  He was nonetheless hysterically nervous before his audition with the Royal Academy. The panel consisted of Claud
e Rains (who regularly taught at the school), Dorothy Green (a leading Shakespearienne, later Cleopatra to John Gielgud’s Antony), and Kenneth Barnes, the principal, who remained at his post till the early fifties. Charles gave his Shylock, and it must have been all right, because the audition was on May 6th, and he was enrolled on the 8th. The school was still labouring under the post-war surplus of women – there were only four men in Laughton’s class of twenty.

  Despite this disadvantage, and before it had deteriorated into a sort of alternative finishing school in the forties, it was a highly prestigious institution, one of only two major drama schools in London (the other was Elsie Fogerty’s much more recent Central School). The curriculum was crowded and very straightforward: fencing, dancing, gesture, elocution. At all of these Charles competed in the Scholarship Competition and received a Special Honourable Mention.

  For the rest, the training, not based on any theory or system, was in the hands of the tutors, who worked on scenes. Dorothy Green directed Shakespeare scenes; Claude Rains, who was such an influence on the young John Gielgud, worked on various one-act plays. But the teacher who transformed him, who saw what was extraordinary in him and drew it, sometimes painfully, out of him, was the formidable Frenchwoman, Alice Gachet. She remained close to Laughton for the rest of her life, and indeed, he supported her with a small allowance during her declining years. At the outset of their relationship she told him, ‘I will break your heart, but I will make an artist of you.’

  Her special approach to him was to refuse to confine him to character roles: she insisted that he must play his lovers and heroes. And he flowered, moved and challenged by her confidence in him (‘Knows what he wants. Gives everything to it. Breaking bad habits’). His confidence as an actor always needed to be supplied from without. Their bond was made even stronger by his fluency (thanks to the nuns) in French, a subject in its own right on the timetable. She directed him in a scene from Molière’s L’Amour médecin, in which he played Sganarelle at his graduation performance.