Charles Laughton (12 page)

The autobiographical nature of his acting thus continued. There is a wonderful freedom about his performance, his puffy white flesh – of which a great deal is on display – quivering with delight. His physical conception of the role seems to be heavily indebted to Aubrey Beardsley’s Salome illustrations – more particularly his cruel caricature of Oscar Wilde. Elsa calls the performance ‘Charles’ wild
Wilde
Nero’ and that’s just what it is. Agate, in his review, wrote: ‘As Nero, Mr Charles Laughton enjoys himself hugely, playing the Emperor as the flaunting extravagant queen he probably was.’ His contemporaries knew exactly what he was up to.

De Mille was allegedly in despair when the audience laughed at the previews. Exactly what he’d intended, countered Charles. The brilliant notices and wonderful business (despite the crash of ’33) mollified de Mille to the point where he was able to write his mellow memories twenty-five years later.

It must be conceded that Laughton’s performance somewhat compromises de Mille’s moralising scheme: to hell with the Christians, the person we want to see is Nero, drawling epigrams, licking grapes, madly laughing. Peter Ustinov’s later performance of the same character (in Melvyn Leroy’s
Quo Vadis
) though witty in its own right, quite lacks the anarchy and the danger of Laughton’s monstrous perverse baby, strutting and fooling and (yes, of course) fiddling while Rome burns.

The babyishness of Nero is shared by many of his characters, especially – for satirical purposes – those in power or, more pathetically, the oppressed. It was as near as he came to depicting innocence. The actual vulnerability of childhood coupled with the fantasies of omnipotence which are its antidote were well understood by Laughton. In the case of Nero, he was also amused to allude to the Fascist dictators of the period: but his perception of all power was the same: a childish charade. He never allowed a ruler any dignity.

At the end of filming, de Mille asked him who he’d like to play next, and, with the cheek which had informed his portrayal of Arnold Bennett in
Mr Prohack
, he replied: ‘You’.

He’d done his two films for Paramount; in theory he was free to return to England. He didn’t. He signed for one more picture; and then another. He was beginning to get a sense of what he could do with the medium.

His next film,
Payment Deferred
(producer Irving Thalberg, director Lothar Mendes), did not greatly increase his knowledge in that regard, but it is an indispensable record of his stage work. It is quite startling, though not strictly a film performance (in Orson Welles’ definition, it dictates to the camera rather than inviting). The essential grammar of all Laughton’s subsequent performances is there: the heavy lids, the sense of barely contained energy, the sexual voluptuousness a millimetre below the surface, the sudden accelerandos and heart-stopping ritardandos. His mastery of the elusive territory
between
lower-middle and middle-middle class is as subtle and as striking as it would ever be. But it is the number of variations he manages to create in this stock character that is breathtaking. From testy paterfamilias, to downtrodden clerk, to homicide, to newly-awakened lover (in the scene with his vampish neighbour, ‘Madam Collins’) the range of his William Marble is extraordinary. If one of the essential attributes of great acting is to offer value for money, Laughton was already, at the age of 34, a great actor.

The film failed at the box office, but, according to
Kine Weekly
, ‘he proves, if proof were necessary, that he is one of the screen’s greatest actors.’

There were incidental consequences to the making of
Payment Deferred
: one was his association with Irving Thalberg, with whom he formed an immediate bond, and but for whose demise (three years later) his subsequent professional development might have been quite different.

The other was the departure of Elsa Lanchester. Her independent career and indeed existence had ground to a halt. She was ‘the wife’, both socially and in reality: at the rate Laughton was working she can have seen little of him: late at night or early morning. Visiting him at the studio would not be a good idea. Nothing is more distressing for an out-of-work actor than to visit a place of others’ work. Elsa’s bright acerbic self would not take well to sympathetic enquiries. They may not even have known that she
was
an actress.

An unemployed actor in Hollywood is a citizen without a state. When the part of Winnie Marble in
Payment Deferred
– her part in both London and New York – went, despite Laughton’s championship of her, to Maureen O’Sullivan, she simply went back to England, to look for a new house for them, to pick up a little self-respect.

Charles plunged into the next massive role: Dr Moreau in the film of H. G. Wells’ novella, now called – why? –
Island of Lost Souls
. The shoot was full of physical discomfort, the director Earle Kenton (despite the cinematographer, Karl Struss’ description of him as ‘the most intelligent man I ever worked with’) was pompous and bullying, and the part of the obsessed and sinister scientist was disturbing.

In it, as it happens, Laughton gives one of his very best performances. Perhaps the discomfort of the location (Catalina Island), the fog in which Struss immersed everything, and above all the presence of the restless and cooped-up animals created a kind of world of the imagination in which his creativity throve. He creates a frightening picture of a gentleman-monster, dabbling with the genetic basis of
life
, somehow suggesting that he himself is one of his own half-animal/half-humans. The impression, which Laughton was particularly skilled at suggesting, that his clothes and indeed his very body can barely contain overwhelming impulses and desires, creates a dimension in Moreau which is both frightening and sympathetic. He goes towards his ghoulish task with such relish. In a James Whale movie this would be funny or merely off-the-wall;
chez
Laughton it’s a manifestation of the life-force, albeit a perverted one.

His last stand, whip in hand as the animals and mutants turn on him, is pitiful and terrible. It’s hard to think of another actor who could bring it off.

The whole film is remarkably concentrated and powerful. Bela Lugosi is fine as Moreau’s mutant servant who leads the revolt of the mutants. Despite the publicity campaign’s Nationwide Search For The Panther Woman, the film was not a success. It was not released in England, where the censor banned it, claiming that its events were ‘against nature.’ ‘So is Mickey Mouse,’ Lanchester wittily observed.

As a kind of
bonne bouche
Laughton ended his first stint of film-making with one of his funniest and most economical performances: Phineas V. Lambert in
If I Had a Million
, Ernst Lubitsch’s compendium movie tracing the effect of an unexpected windfall on eight different people. Laughton’s sequence, directed by Lubitsch himself – each episode had its own director – immediately became a classic, and has remained so. It couldn’t be simpler, but there is a kind of genius in Laughton’s restraint.

He plays a clerk sitting at a desk, one of hundreds (in a shot anticipating Billy Wilder’s similar one in
The Apartment
). The letter informing him that he’s been given a million dollars arrives on his desk and is dealt with in due course. Nothing on the clerk’s bespectacled, droopily moustached face betrays a flicker of reaction. He punctiliously lays the letter to one side, folds it, and places it in his pocket. He gets up, walks the length of the office to the corridor. He waits for the lift. He enters it. He ascends. He disembarks, walks down the corridor. He arrives at a door, he enters. Another door. He enters that. Again. Finally he arrives at the door of the President of the corporation. He knocks. He’s told to enter. With exactly the same phlegmatic moon-face that he’s borne all along, he blows a raspberry and departs. End of sequence.

Even now, when the film is shown, audiences generally cheer at this point. It is the perfect instance of the revenge of the underdog – in its comic mode. Laughton created many variations, tragic and comic, on
that
theme, but the pacing, the dead-pan, the even keel of the
If I Had a Million
sequence is a sort of perfection, in the league of the great silent comedians. Like many of them, he creates the laughter by his very expressionlessness: the audience supplies the thoughts. This power of suggestion, rather than statement, is not usually associated with Laughton (though certainly, of course, with Lubitsch). Laughton himself said that the whole journey to Hollywood had been justified by working with Lubitsch. Their styles and preoccupations blend so perfectly that it is impossible to separate their contributions.

À propos of
If I Had a Million
Elsa Lanchester regrets, in her book, that Charles didn’t work with more great directors – or, she says, great men in any sphere. This seems a little harsh on someone who made films with Renoir, Hitchcock, Wilder, Preminger, and who was a close friend of Henry Moore, Albert Manessier, and Bertolt Brecht, but certainly it is sad that Laughton never worked again with Lubitsch.

(There is an amusing postscript to the making of Laughton’s section of the film. The producers were informed that the English censors would not accept the final raspberry: it would be necessary to make an alternative ending. Laughton himself proposed the replacement gesture: an unequivocable Vs up sign. He must have been as surprised as anyone to hear that the censors accepted this and it was duly made, causing shocks of delight among English audiences who could scarcely believe their luck.)

It is worth recalling again that Laughton had by the end of 1932, his first year in Hollywood, completed six major films, playing opposite and alongside world-famous stars (
If I Had a Million
alone boasts Charles Ruggles, W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, George Raft). He had been acclaimed every time, generally deemed to have ‘stolen the film’ on each occasion. He was unquestionably
A Star
, though he didn’t yet realise the full significance of that, either in terms of the power it bought him, or the public acclaim he would begin to receive.

What is most remarkable is not his meteoric rise, astonishing though that is, but how well he handled it. The poise and the ease of his performance in the Lubitsch film is almost unbelievable from a young Englishman, just turned thirty-three years of age, with only six years professional experience behind him, gifted neither with great beauty or great social
savoir-faire
. Faced with overpowering personalities, men used to being obeyed and women used to being deferred to, a publicity machine unparalleled in world history, the promise of
limitless
wealth and unimaginable fame, his focus never veered from the work in hand. He concentrated on getting better and more truthful with every performance.

It was an unusual approach in Hollywood, in 1932.

London Again

AGATE: ‘IT WILL
be extremely interesting when Mr Charles Laughton returns to these shores to see whether the crowd queues up for him as it does for a new actor who threatens to become a rival of La Garbo or La Dietrich … the reception accorded Mr Laughton when and if he comes will tell us which way the battle swings as between theatre and cinema.’

In fact, Laughton stepped off the ship to be greeted by a horde of photographers and journalists, at whom he flourished, symbolically, a walking-stick he brought back as a present. ‘Who is it for?’ they cried. ‘The greatest actor of us all,’ he answered. ‘Who? Who?’ ‘I should have thought you would have guessed: Sir Gerald du Maurier, of course.’ No movie star: the doyen of the English profession.

Laughton had come back to London almost certainly intending to resume his brilliant stage career. Virtually everything he had done in the theatre had been hugely successful. The range of work had been remarkable too, though it had not encompassed the classics. He wanted to push himself in every way, emotionally, physically and technically, and that meant the classics, which are both a training and a test. In London in 1933,
that
meant the Old Vic, the only theatre regularly performing a classical repertory.

Laughton wasn’t an especially firm admirer of the Vic, which he found both dingy and worthy. Design – always a preoccupation of his – was a low priority, perhaps even somewhat frowned upon by Lilian Baylis, the Vic’s formidable manager. Laughton wasn’t an especially firm admirer of hers, either. He found her penny-pinching, pious and Philistine. However, the stimulating young Tyrone Guthrie was about to take over the artistic directorship, determined to shake the place up, so when Flora Robson brought them together over dinner, and they sparked each other off, a deal was struck: Charles and Flora would head the company for Guthrie’s first season.

Lilian Baylis was as wary of Laughton as he was of her. She disliked film stars, in fact any stars at all, claiming that they brought the wrong kind of audience to the Vic – the despised ‘West Enders’. She was there to serve ‘our people’, that is, the local South East Londoners, the same audience for whom her Aunt Emma Cons had founded the Vic – principally to get them off the streets and out of the gin palaces and give them something uplifting to fill their minds with: opera for preference, but Shakespeare (
most
of Shakespeare) would do – cheaper, too.

This approach to running the national theatre, which was what, by default, the Vic had become, was ludicrous to Charles. As an ex-hotelier he abhorred the drabness with which the theatre was run; as an intellectual, he despised the lack of artistic vision behind Baylis’ attitudes. As a downright Yorkshireman, he was moved to cussedness by her (Anglo-South African) cussedness.

She guessed that he would want more money than her regular actors, and she suspected that he was merely
using
the Vic to learn how to act; and she was right, on both counts. He asked for £15 a week, instead of £10; and he had no Shakespearean experience. On the other hand, his salary in Hollywood had been $2,500 a week; and he was one of the most brilliant and acclaimed actors in England. Their relationship was full of little balance sheets like that.