Charles Laughton (3 page)

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, Corridors 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.

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.