Charles Laughton (27 page)

The burning sun that summer broke all records; 100°F was the average temperature. Laughton suffered and suffered under the make-up, and there was no relief when, bruised and weak with exhaustion, he stumbled home; it was so hot that sleep was impossible. The wet sheets they draped their bodies with to keep cool were bone dry in ten minutes. He had, anyway, to get up at four o’clock in the morning to start the make-up.

Even that, though, was not enough. Westmore reports that in the scene on the wheel where he’s lashed while the crowd jeers, he asked the make-up assistant to take his foot and twist it. ‘More, more,’ he screamed, ‘twist it more.’ Elsa Lanchester reports that Charles was upset by a remark of Dieterle’s: on the sixteenth take of the scene, Dieterle – ‘in the intimate tone directors use to confide their tricks, their genius, their wares and ideas’, she says, with magnificent contempt … ‘leaned over to Charles and whispered: ‘Now, Charles, listen to me. Let’s do it one more time, but this time I want you … I want you to suffer.’ For this,’ she says, ‘Charles never forgave Dieterle.’ That may be so; but, in view of Laughton’s state of mind during the film, it seems to have been a very sympathetic and even helpful thing to have said – really entering into cahoots with him.

The awareness of events in Europe so far, far away, hung heavily over the making of the film: and the day war was declared, Dieterle wrote, ‘the tension on the soundstage was unbearable. The scene in which Quasimodo rings the bell for Esmerelda, high in the bell tower … was supposed to be a kind of love scene between these two, but it developed into something so powerful, that everybody including myself forgot that we were shooting a film. Something super-dimensional happened at that moment, so that I forgot to call “cut” according to custom as the scene ended. Laughton went on ringing the bells after the scene was really over. Finally, completely exhausted, he stopped. Nobody was able to speak, nobody moved. It was an unforgettable thing. Finally, in his dressing-room, Charles could only say: “I couldn’t think of Esmerelda in that scene at all. I could only think of the poor people out there, going in to fight that bloody, bloody war! To arouse the world, to stop that terrible butchery! Awake! Awake! That’s what I felt when I was ringing the bells!”’

This is what acting can be. In
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
every scene that Laughton plays is informed by this sense of relation to the whole of mankind’s life. Of the scene on the wheel, Dieterle wrote: ‘when Laughton acted that scene, enduring the terrible torture, he
was
not the poor crippled creature expecting compassion from the mob, but rather oppressed and enslaved mankind, suffering the most awful injustice.’

Two years before, Laughton had gone to see Laurence Olivier play
Henry V
at the Old Vic. Going back to congratulate him after the performance, he asked Olivier if he knew
why
he was so good. ‘Because you
are
England, that’s why,’ Laughton told him. Elsa Lanchester claims that the remark is apocryphal, uncharacteristic of Charles. On the contrary, it is exactly what he believed: that acting could transfigure the raw material of the actor and the character into the embodiment of huge ideas and human realities.

But the intensity of feeling that was the pressure behind his work, that was the source of its size and richness, was never indulged in the performance; quite the opposite. His Quasimodo is rarely seen to suffer at all. One of the most striking images of all is of the hunchback turning round and round on the wheel as the lash falls, expressing no pain, simply turned to stone, the suffering motionless, as eternal as a negro spiritual or the tombs of Belsen, numb, vast, fathomless. Then he glimpses Frollo, who may be coming to rescue him. His eyes light up with a dog’s mute yearning – but Frollo passes on, followed by the still yearning eyes of Quasimodo. Esmerelda climbs onto the wheel. She offers him water. He pulls away. She persists. He drinks, knowing he can trust her. He gobbles it greedily. He’s released from the wheel and limps alone back to Notre Dame. He goes in through the great door, locks it carefully behind him. He sees Frollo. ‘She gave me water,’ he says, with the utmost simplicity.

Every moment in the sequence is simple, direct, precise. Its emotional impact is overwhelming, because of the suffusion of every cell of the actor’s being with the essence of the character’s experience. The character’s gestures, actions, utterances reveal this essence at every moment. There is no need for the actor to try to be moving, or impressive, or to show why he does this or that. The doing is enough. When Quasimodo approaches Esmerelda with a bird in a cage and having given it to her tries to tell her of his love, he places his hands, very simply, over his face. It is almost impossible to watch the scene, such is the piercing expressiveness of this gesture; but it is simplicity itself.

In the bell-ringing scene, his laughter as he compares himself to the man in the moon stems from very deep indeed, and is sustained so long that it becomes a laugh at the whole idea of deformity, at the idea of appearance at all.

In short, Laughton does with acting what great creative artists attempt: to sound the deepest and the highest notes of human possibility, to exalt the human soul, and to heal the damaged heart.

It is absurd to speak of Laughton’s Quasimodo as a
great performance
, as if that were some quantifiable assessment. It is acting at its greatest; it is Laughton at his greatest; it is a cornerstone of this century’s dramatic achievement; it is a yardstick for all acting.

At the time, some people liked it; and some didn’t. It was his third and best gift to impressionists the world over; and it was the last time he risked madness and physical collapse to fashion from his own psyche an image of the human condition. He decided, instead, that he would join the human race, and try being Charles Laughton instead of Philoctetes, the bleeding, smelling patron of artists, exiled to his island with his wound and his bow.

Now he wanted to like himself, and to be liked; to create, certainly, but from materials that lay outside his own body. He climbed down from the cross, pulled out the nails, and made with uncertain steps for real life.

PART TWO

Change of Life

THERE IS NO
evidence that Laughton saw his career as falling conveniently into two halves – the first, everything up to Quasimodo, the second, everything after it; there is no evidence that he took any conscious decision to find his ultimate fulfilment elsewhere, or to find a different channel for creative expression. The fact remains, however, that if all record or mention of his work up to 1939 were lost, the remaining performances would seem intelligent, well-observed, powerful, striking, often moving, and always, even at their very least inspired, watchable; but – with two remarkable exceptions over the twenty odd years left to him – in none of them does Laughton function as a primary creative artist, as he did in Nero, Bligh, Barrett, Quasimodo, even Phineas V. Lambert. In short, from now on he put his talent into his acting, his genius elsewhere.

The factors involved in this re-routeing of creative energies are complex, but principal among them is a change in Laughton’s attitude to himself, whether
on account of
his experience playing the hunchback, or merely
after
it. It can hardly be coincidental that all the new elements which entered his life during the next few years – teaching, public reading, directing, and having love affairs – were activities which focused on him as himself, rather than as a character. It may be that he had exorcised his self-loathing in taking on, not merely the hideousness of feature of Quasimodo, but the lunatic self-destructive urges of all mankind: as Elsa Lanchester so vividly put it, ‘he took physical torture over and above what was needed – a sort of purging of his human weakness and general guilt. Not guilt for any piddling little act. Just guilt for an overall insufficiency of perfection in life and work.’

Elsa Lanchester had joined Laughton just before the start of filming, in the weeks of tension which preceded the invasion of Poland. When war did break out, they, like the rest of the Hollywood Brits, were advised by the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, to stay in America where they would be of most use in making out the British case. The pro-German lobby was powerful and vocal, and every positive image was needed to counteract it. So they, and most of the English actors, stayed. Some, like Laurence Olivier, defied the ambassadorial advice and stole away in secret, passionate for action.
The
rest, feeling oddly guilty, were as conspicuous in England’s cause as could be. In the end, they undoubtedly did more good where they were; but back home, there was a widespread feeling that they had got off lightly. Most of them were well beyond enlisting age; many of them, like Laughton, had seen action in the First World War. The feeling in England was that, fighting or not, an Englishman’s duty was to be inconvenienced. In fact, during the blitz, the Laughtons’ house in Gordon Square was hit by a stricken divebomber – the only house in the square to suffer. ‘I should be glad to sacrifice twenty houses if German divebombers would smash themselves to bits on them. To hell with the cash if they can bring down the Junkers. It was a glorious end for the house’ Charles told the
New York Times
; but a lurking impression of malingering persisted.

His first assignment after
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was, one might guess, specially chosen by him as light relief: an adaptation of Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play,
They Knew What They Wanted
, a genial piece set in the Italian community in the Napa Valley of California. Laughton plays Tony Patucci, the simple, good-hearted but unprepossessing vineyard owner who, on a rare visit to town, falls in love with a waitress (Carole Lombard) whom he hasn’t even spoken to. He proposes to her by post, sending her a photograph, not of himself, but of his handsome employee, William Gargan, with whom she then, of course, falls in love.

It’s a classic Laughton character, and a classic Laughton situation: too classic. How much longer could he go on re-cycling the same complex? As long, presumably, as he needed to. But now, it would seem, the wound was healing. His approach to the rôle reveals a marked reluctance to tear the scab off again. Other actors could have made a great deal of the touchingly written part of Tony – indeed they had, in the two previous filmed versions (one starring Edward G. Robinson) and in its musical apotheosis, Frank Loesser’s
Most Happy Fella
; Laughton could only have done something remarkable with it by living through every painful step in the character’s journey through hope, doubt, self-hatred, pity, anguish, to the final hard-won happy resolution. On this occasion, and increasingly hereafter, he declined. The result is a performance in which, despite occasional flickers of intense expression, the actor appears to be sulking. This unattractive quality sadly pervades a great deal of his work in the two remaining decades of his career.

By chance, we have extensive documentation of this unsuccessful
performance
in this unimportant film, because it was directed by Garson Kanin, whose career as a chronicler has long since eclipsed his career as a creator. His account of the filming rivals von Sternberg’s chapter on
I, Claudius
as the most vividly one-sided portrait of Laughton. It appears in his book
Hollywood
, and like von Sternberg’s account, it presents its author as the epitome of sweet reason and patience, bewildered by the antics of the child-monster, Laughton. In fact, Kanin was something of a boy-monster himself at the time of filming: twenty-seven-years-old, flushed with his, as it turned out short-lived, triumph as a director (
The Great Man Votes, Bachelor Mother, My Favourite Wife
, all within a year), ex-jazzman, hoofer, vaudevillian and finally Broadway actor, quip-happy, bursting at the seams with what on the cocktail circuit passes for intelligence, he viewed the fat, battle-weary veteran of the unequal struggle to forge Art from unyielding life with brisk amusement going on affection: ‘C’mon, cuddles,’ he’d say to him; or ‘C’mon Chuck.’ Faced with the complex inertia of the man of a million quivering impulses, he tried to josh him into giving a performance. This was a miscalculation.

Added to Laughton’s usual pre-natal apprehension at the start of any project was a particular displeasure at the casting of his co-star, Lombard. He and she had proved to be out of sympathy in
White Woman
. He found her broad, ‘one-of-the-boys’ social style impossible to handle, and her preferred dialect, Anglo-Saxon, offended him deeply. To Kanin, on the other hand, she was a model actress: he admiringly recounts how she simply picked up her page of dialogue before the shot, learned it, and then spoke it with perfect naturalness. Well, if that’s your definition of acting, of course Laughton would seem to be making a lot of fuss over nothing. The fact that in the finished film she gives a performance of unrelieved one-dimensionality seems not to excite Kanin’s censure; she had a great personality, she learned her lines, she looked pretty. What else is there? Laughton, on the other hand, was slowly circling the dreaded task. His preparation was oblique, as ever: oblique because the undertaking was not a simple one. He was not aiming for verisimilitude: he was erecting the derrick which would enable him to drill for the deep black oil which was lurking – even
hiding
, he may mournfully have thought – inside him; the substance which would turn Tony Patucci from a chap with a girl-problem in some Californian valley into an icon of the transcendence of physical limitations, the transforming power of love – whatever. Who knows what Laughton might have made of Tony Patucci? He never got there. It wasn’t worth the effort.

‘From now until the first day of shooting, I propose to study the paintings of Michelangelo, listen to nothing but Vivaldi, and read aloud, in the original, the epic poetry of Dante.’ How Kanin’s friends must have
shrieked
with laughter when he reported to them this remark of Laughton’s. What had any of that to do with Tony Patucci? Just learn the lines, Chuck, it’s all there. After all, Sidney Howard won a
Pulitzer Prize
for them. What point explaining that by touching some essence of Italian-ness, he might release a dimension in Tony Patucci that would resonate through the whole film, enriching its character beyond recognition?