Charles Laughton (38 page)

If the performance was perceived by contemporary filmmakers the way it was by the critic of the
New York Times
, it’s scarcely surprising: ‘Charles Laughton simpers and fidgets as the scummy “fixer” who has considerable trouble with sore feet.’ That’s it. Simpering and fidgeting are words that come up in Laughton notices with monotonous regularity. These things become critical reflexes: Laughton? Simper and fidget, of course! If that’s what you’re expecting, that’s what you’ll see. In his next film,
The Man on the Eiffel Tower
, his worst enemy couldn’t accuse him of simpering or fidgeting. Unfortunately, he does nothing at all, as far as the eye can detect. His Maigret, which might have been rather interesting – his Poirot having been such a triumph – is soporific to the point of catatonia; a somnambulistic performance which does nothing to clarify or expedite a severely turgid plot. After a while, he totally abandons the accent which he half-heartedly essays at the beginning. It is only in the final chase sequence that he shows any life, and then he becomes very dynamic, but not, unfortunately, any more interesting. It is one of the few performances in his output which has almost nothing to recommend it.

The film, however, is of great significance in his career, because
with
it he made his directorial début. According to Charles Higham, he found it impossible to work with Irving Allan, the designated director (who was also the producer), so Franchot Tone, whose company was making the film, decided to attempt a bold experiment in co-operative film-making: the actors would take over. Burgess Meredith would take overall responsibility and direct all the scenes he wasn’t in; Charles would direct all the scenes
he
wasn’t in and Tone would do anything left over. This arrangement left Charles in charge of the beginning and the end of the film: as it happens, the only parts of it worth watching. The final chase is exciting enough, and uses the Parisian streets to very good effect (the credits, quite properly, end with ‘and the City of Paris’); but the film’s opening sequence has real flair and menace, as the camera slowly takes the scene in. The director of photography was Stanley Cortez, Welles’ cameraman on
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and he must have offered advice to all three tyro directors. It is only here, though, at the beginning, that anything approaching an expressive frame is achieved. For the rest it’s visually efficient, no more. ‘Everybody left Paris to catch a ship, leaving me and Charles behind to do the finishing sequences. That’s when I got to thinking Charles would make a good director,’ wrote Cortez later. ‘I saw Paris through his eyes, all of Paris; and he knew Paris better than most Frenchmen.’

Laughton had evidently lost all interest in acting while absorbed and challenged by the new medium. Certainly the actress he introduced into the picture, Belita, at that time topping the bill at Les Ambassadeurs as an ice-skater, had enormous time and thought lavished on her in her rôle as the lens-grinder’s wife. He took her to Les Halles to pick exactly the right skirts for the layers and layers of clothes he decided she must wear – pointed out possible models for her character in the streets. He offered her all his enormous concentration and power of inspiration, leaving none over, it would appear, for his own performance.

Back in Los Angeles, he deemed his group of students was ready to work on a play for public presentation: or perhaps he deemed he was ready to direct a play. He was nearly fifty by the time he came to this point: his contemporaries in England, Gielgud and Olivier, had started directing without a moment’s hesitation almost as soon as their names appeared above the lights. It was the tradition – the obligation, one might say. To lead a company, to put plays on, was synonymous with directing. They staged the most complex plays in a matter of
weeks
, with themselves in vast and difficult leading rôles; both Gielgud and Olivier, for example, had directed themselves in
King Lear
. Such a thought would have been inconceivable to the young Laughton: his self-consciousness would never have allowed him to organise or control other people; besides, his own performances were all-absorbing. For the older Laughton, the problem was that he saw so much in the play, was aware of such depths and resonances, all of which he wanted to capture, that the ordinary conditions available for staging it would simply be inadequate. In time, he would find that no longer true; for the present, teaching with the group offered an ideal halfway house. He knew them, he trusted them, they had plenty of time. Perhaps they could begin to do justice to some great play … and, providentially, at that moment, Eugénie Leontovich, who, after her great triumphs in
Grand Hotel
and
Twentieth Century
, had also established a teaching group with whom she had been performing plays at her own Stage Theatre (a converted hat-shop) approached Charles and suggested that they collaborate. She would contribute the theatre, he would direct, and
his
students (none of hers) would form the company. He and she would play the leading parts. And so, after due consideration,
The Cherry Orchard
, a play which Charles by now knew rather well, was settled on.

Rehearsals were spread out over three months. The pre-rehearsal symposium was maintained, now followed by work on the play. Charles’ method was straightforward: everybody was expected to know their lines, he placed them and then worked line by line on the scene. He was a hard, hard taskmaster. He directed, on the whole, by demonstration, a daunting procedure if there were any expectation of imitation, but what Charles was aiming at was a physical shorthand, the most vivid way of suggesting the inner sensation of the character, the suggested route for the transformation. He never gave inflexions or line readings; what he was attempting to suggest was another way of being. His demonstrations were complete transformations: when he was working with actresses he would become more feminine than any of them, with actors he revealed unexpected athleticism. Belita, who had begged to be allowed to join the group, and finally did after a six-month apprenticeship of making coffee and doing the tidying up – at a time when she was the most famous ice-skater in the world! – was amazed by his physical freedom. ‘He’d sort of stretch out and his whole body, which you know was quite large, would sort of get thin.’ He wanted to bring Marcel Marceau to Hollywood to give the group lessons. He’d already laid on – at his own expense – voice classes with a
celebrated
voice coach of the day, Margaret Prentice MacLean. He was, as he said to Bentley, training the group. If he was an actor-manager, it was in a completely different sense to the familiar English one; it had more in common with the French tradition, of men like Copeau, Dullin, Jouvet: actor-philosophers, proponents of a new way. It is hard to say what that new way was, in Laughton’s case. His theoretical musings have the air of being elaborate rationalisations of intuitive understanding. He used many techniques – an exercise called ‘tell me a story,’ for example, in which he’d stop rehearsal and have the actors tell stories, any kind of stories, to restore their sense of narrative – but what he stood for was simply deeper and deeper exploration into the characters and the rôles until the hard nugget of the real was struck. Laughton has so often been described (not least in these pages) as a realist, and so he is, but what he was after, both as actor and as director, was not in fact real
ism
;
reality
was what he sought, the location and presentation of the real. Not verisimilitude (if that’s the criterion, then he frequently fails), but something which has its own life and truth; which is its own reality.

He didn’t probe or delve into the personalities of his actors, he simply goaded them on to deeper and deeper depths. In the rehearsals he created a strongly emotional feeling, which could easily dissolve into laughter or tears. In his notes he was often, says Richard Lupino, a young English member of the group, ‘on a knife edge of cruelty’ – but ‘if you fitted in with his crusade of the moment, you were part of him. If he saw something he loved he would make it part of him.’ He expected unflagging work till all hours of the morning, and you wouldn’t be surprised if he called you up at four in the morning because he thought he’d discovered something new in the script; or wanted to show you a Japanese print he’d just bought.

There is an unavoidable sense of ego-massage in all this, which is not denied by his pupil/fellow-artists’ love of him and of his approach. What matters is that it worked. ‘Steadily the century turned and the globe and, in spite of all, the time and place became Chekhov’s. The audience laughed, was hushed, and wept. Hearts were touched, minds fired, emotions disturbed. It all added up to as pure a piece of theatre experience as I have ever known,’ wrote Ruth Gordon of his
Cherry Orchard
. Her husband, Garson Kanin, with all the reason in the world to find nothing pleasant to say about it, wrote: ‘He had assembled a group of unemployed and unemployable players … and directed the whole company as though he and they were truly Russian. It is a play I go to see performed at every opportunity, but I
have
never seen its quality as fully realised as in Laughton’s production, not even by the Moscow Art Theatre.’ In addition to Leontovich, he had recruited the distinguished Italian actress-manager Maria Bazzi to play Charlotta Ivanovna, had persuaded Harry Homer, one of Hollywood’s most famous art directors (
Our Town, The Little Foxes
), to design the play, and Karl Struss, the great lighting cameraman (
Sign of the Cross
and
The Island of Lost Souls
amongst many others) to light it. He had given minute attention to every aspect of the production. His own performance as Gayev – genial, melancholy – was held to be very fine, and the performances of the company, as Kanin implied, were better than they knew themselves capable of. It was an ideal cornerstone for an ensemble. ‘The future is bright,’ wrote Ruth Gordon in
Theatre Arts
, ‘there will be tours and a repertory company. And perhaps, one day, a theatre of their own. And new actors, perhaps directors and playwrights as well. All because an urge to move forward was somehow crystallised, because an unselfish man took a courageous chance, because work and achievement came before gain, because the theatre is a living treasure, and because there are still the stage-struck.’

None of it was to be. The reasons are several, but they come together in the striking person of Paul Gregory, agent, hustler, manager, promoter, producer, who leaped into Laughton’s life from nowhere, and played at different times the rôles of fairy godmother and demon king.

New life

THE FORTIES HAD
been a period of germination, of slow exploration of new possibilities. Paul Gregory seemed to act as a catalyst on Laughton, turning possibilities into actualities. Within a couple of years of the new decade, Laughton, up till then apparently drifting aimlessly but generally downward, had become one of the best-known, best-loved, most formidably creative and respected figures on the American scene. This transformation of fortunes was largely wrought by Gregory, who shrewdly and with flair exploited some of the vast resources of his unique property. A junior agent at MCA, the giant artists’ agency, he had seen Laughton read the Burning Fiery
Furnace
episode from the Book of Daniel on television (the
Ed Sullivan Show
, in fact) and had suddenly conceived a brilliant and fully-fledged notion: Laughton should devise a whole evening of readings and tour the country with them, playing one-night stands in auditoria – they needn’t even be theatres – all over the country. It would cost nothing whatever, and he could ask very substantial fees – perhaps 2,000 dollars a show. When he finally got to see Laughton, he proved very persuasive, and, in early 1950, they went out on the road for the first time. It was a huge success, beyond even Gregory’s enthusiastic projections. Charles then returned to Hollywood, to work on
The Cherry Orchard
. It ran for nearly six months, and, true to the group’s programme for the future, they started to rehearse another play,
Twelfth Night
, in which Charles was to play Toby Belch. They reached a fair state of readiness, too, when Gregory (who actually managed
Cherry Orchard
), pulled the plug on it. His reasons were mainly financial: Charles could be making a fortune on the road; at the Stage Theatre, he, like everyone else, was on an Equity ‘Little Theatres’ minimum salary of $10 a week. And Charles needed the money very badly. Gregory, moreover, felt, as he revealed some years later, in a somewhat hysterical interview for Barry Norman’s profile of Laughton in the
Hollywood Greats
series, that the teaching ‘was just an ego-trip for Laughton. He fancied himself with people following him around adoring him’. Several members of the group felt that Gregory was implacably hostile to it, with a hostility that went beyond mere financial self-interest. He was impatient to get on with handling Laughton. His creative energy was roused by the thought of what he could do with Laughton; he felt, in some way, that Laughton was
his
. Gregory has been described as demonic, even diabolic, and the young actors of the group felt that this startlingly handsome young blond was Charles’ dark angel.

Norman Lloyd and others have suggested that Laughton was in love with Gregory, which is both possible and understandable; what is certain is that he was only too willing to be handled, to have someone lick his life into shape – provided, of course, that it was a shape he approved of. In the case of the readings, it most certainly was. He had found (Gregory had found
for
him) an ideal medium for his gifts.

At the heart of the enterprise was his passion for story-telling. In his introduction to the compendium,
Tell Me a Story
, that he published in 1957, he writes this touching account of that passion.

As I am not an inventor of stories – I have many times tried to write very simple stories, but they all looked and sounded terrible the
next
morning – I have become a teller of stories. I would like to become the man who knows all the stories … That can never be, because no man will ever know all the stories. When I go into a good book-store or library, I often feel sad when I see the shelves of books of all kinds that I know I will never be able to enjoy. I think of all the wonderful tales I will never know and I wish I could live to be a thousand years old.