Charles Laughton (41 page)

Bury the purple dream

Of the America we have not been,

The tropic empire seeking the warm sea,

The last foray of aristocracy

Based not on dollars or initiative

Or any blood for what blood was worth

But on a certain code, a manner of birth,

A certain manner of knowing how to live,

The pastoral rebellion of the earth

Against machines, against the Age of Steam.

Sentiments with which Charles Laughton was perfectly in sympathy. His version, a skilful digest of the nearly four hundred pages of the original into a two-hours’ traffic of the stage, preserves all the elements, the folksy, the lyric, the epic and the philosophical, in a shape which maintains the overall pulse of the poem. ‘Charles knew the poem,’ wrote Massey, ‘with a depth I had not anticipated. He loved it with the appreciation of a scholar, with the patriotic fervour of newly-acquired citizenship and with the admiration of a theatre man for a great play.’ A
play
is exactly what
John Brown’s Body
isn’t, and
Laughton
made no attempt to make it into one. It is a narrative epic, an American
Odyssey
or
Aeneid
, to which it was compared by no less a Virgilian than Dudley Fitts; it demanded a form that reinvented the public utterance of the epic poet, the balladeer, the séanachai.

In creating
John Brown’s Body
for the stage, Laughton’s skills as an orchestrator match his editing skills. Sharing the piece between three contrasted voices, he makes them pass the narrative baton around, sometimes in the middle of a sequence; sometimes one or the other will take a single line for emphasis; sometimes, when Benét draws a character, Massey, say, or Anderson, will play that character, but then Power might take over. All this is cleverly varied, and keeps a constant narrative energy which can never tail off into introspection or emotional indulgence. The stroke of genius, however, was the decision to frame the three narrators with an
a capella
chorus of twenty men and women, creating immediate changes of scene, imitating the sounds of nature or of a battle, moaning like the wind, or stamping on the floor like an advancing army. The score – written by William Schumann – is an achievement of the greatest virtuosity, melodically inventive, but equally impressive in wordless, tuneless melismas. Then the chorus breaks up into its components and becomes a group of twenty individuals, sometimes chanting
en masse
, or interjecting a shouted line, or grimly reiterating ‘John Brown’s Body lies a-
mouldering
in the ground,’ toneless, threatening. The culmination of their contribution comes at the work’s end, when, as Benét’s metre changes for his evocation of the New Age, they become machines, tracks, railway engines, with electrifying mechanical stabs and rumblings:

Out of John Brown’s strong sinews the tall skyscrapers grow,

Out of his heart the chanting buildings rise,

Rivet and girder, motor and dynamo,

Pillar of smoke by day and fire by night

The steel-faced cities reaching at the skies,

The whole enormous rotating cage hung with hard jewels of electric light.

The effect of sudden transformation anticipates by twenty years the violent assault of ‘Now’ at the end of Stephen Sondheim’s
Pacific Overtures
; same motor rhythms, same frenetic energy, same sense of something dreadful and wonderful in its unstoppable triumph. The very last words of the poem ram this home:

While the prophets shudder and adore

Before the flame, hoping it will give ear,

If you at last must have a word to say,

Say neither, in their way,

‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’

Nor, ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’

The chorus seizes the last three words from the narrator and spits them out like nails.

This
is
a new form of theatre, and it is fully-fledged. Cantata and oratorio-like, in a way, it is also a sensuous and visual form. Though the staging was of the utmost simplicity (a brown backdrop, a little red balcony which the actors could sit on or stand behind), with a certain limited movement by the chorus, the production had come on a long way from the four after-dinner conversationalists of the
Don Juan
evening. A whole world was on this stage. Laughton’s confidence as a director was now fully up – his first-night remarks to the cast are in a quite different tone from his tearful lamentation on the first night of
Don Juan
though the words are almost identical: ‘Well, my dears, you have done exactly what I asked of you. I think I have ruined my career and yours!’ ‘He vanished,’ says Massey, ‘through the pass-door, giggling.’ He had, in fact, done nothing but good for any of them. Tyrone Power, in particular, was for the first time perceived as an exceptional actor; and indeed, in the recording which Columbia made at the time, his work is far the finest of the three, skilful, felt, but always specific, unmarred by the rhetorical windiness which Massey can’t quite throw off (too many patriarchs, no doubt; too many Abe Lincolns and John Browns. He does not always avoid ‘the well-known international clerical tone.’). Judith Anderson, not yet officially a Dame, but acting as if she were, is somewhat severe in her well-bred tones, but her voice is a splendid instrument, and she can cut through the choral textures like a trumpet. For reasons which are not clear, she was replaced on the second tour by Anne Baxter; she had not been well, it is true, but Elsa Lanchester hints that there was something more untoward, and that – as usual – Laughton ‘lacked the courage to do the dirty work himself’.

Howsoever that may be, as a stage director, Massey said, ‘Charles was one of the finest I ever worked with. He lived and breathed theatre; he was resourceful, sensitive and inventive. He was adaptable; he could be firm and also gentle, expressive and taciturn … he made me do just about the most difficult acting job I ever faced.’ What is clear is that this poem of Benét’s touched Laughton deeply; like so much American literature its subject is America’s destiny: what is this country, and who are we? The ontological anxiety at the heart of the American experience was something to which Laughton was no
stranger
. Laughton, like America, took solace in sturdy affirmations drawn from the soil and from the Bible; like America’s, his affirmations seem more willed than achieved. The glory of his version of
John Brown’s Body
is that it fully reflects his, its, and America’s ambivalence.

During the long period of preparation for the Benét, Laughton had lent his weight (that seems to be the correct phrase) to a madly misconceived version of
Salome
, Harry Cohn’s idea of a suitable vehicle for Rita Hayworth; which it might well have been, had Cohn not insisted that the star be a) virginal, and b) Christian. The result of these exigencies is that Miss Hayworth here dances to secure, not John the Baptist’s death, but his reprieve. Laughton is, of course, Herod. His attempts at ogling are somewhat undercut by the range of kilts, blankets and all-purpose upholstery with which the wardrobe department endeavours to cover his bulk. His performance is largely sedentary, but there is a twinkle in his eye, whether lascivious or merely mocking it is hard to divine; most probably the latter if Stewart Granger, who plays a converted tribune, is to be believed. He reports that Laughton was openly contemptuous of the proceedings, from time to time announcing that he proposed to leave the set and read from the Bible. Filming stopped, and everyone listened. This attitude understandably enraged Granger, who was trying his best to make a wretched script work. He accused Laughton of scene-stealing. ‘He didn’t like leading men and did everything to screw me up. Much as I admired his acting, I was in no mood to put up with his tricks and told him if he didn’t stop them I would kick him in the balls. He stopped.’ Laughton simply didn’t care any more. When acting was the centre of his life, his salvation and the source of his self-respect, he would have laboured unceasingly to create something significant. He would have re-written the script, conferred with the director, coached his fellow actors. ‘He rehearsed with his partners, hoping to improve his scenes,’ wrote the director, Dieterle, ‘but ‘a fencing master cannot fence with amateurs,’ was his private remark to me.’ Time was when ‘amateur’ had not been a dirty word to Laughton, but he was a different man now. Now he was in charge of his talent, not at its mercy; its master, not its slave.

Whatever his attitude to the film, however, his performance remains value for money; if anything, it’s insolent in its ease, and, as Dieterle observes, his use of the dialogue, such as it is, is impressive. ‘I knew few actors who could handle dialogue like Laughton, and none
of
them was in the cast of
Salome
.’ In fact, a couple of actors who could handle dialogue very well indeed were in the cast of
Salome
; Alan Badel, as John the Baptist, charismatic as ever, but lacking weight, and Cedric Hardwicke, giving the sort of performance that Laughton never sank to: mere mechanical efficiency, a shell of a performance, just a profile and a voice. Good, bad, gross or glorious, there was never an absence of inner life with Laughton;
something
was always going on inside him. If he sold himself for money, it was always in order to do something rewarding: teach, direct, or maybe just buy a painting.

His self-confidence was complete, too. He had no fear of never being employed again. He had reached that position of eminence, half-way between being an actor and being a legend, that ensured that he’d never want for work. If it was interesting work, so much the better, if not,
tant pis
; his real creative life was – elsewhere. Thus when Harry Cohn tried to push Laughton as Herod towards a more conventionally tyrannical performance (‘being,’ as Dieterle pointed out, ‘himself a little tyrant who bullied his people in the filthiest tongue’) Laughton replied, ‘Tell that son of a bitch up there that he must stick to his business and leave the acting to me. Or else.’

The truth is that the Laughton of
Salome
was to all intents and purposes a different Laughton to the Laughton of fifteen years before, when Dieterle had last worked with him, on
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. Technically, everything was the same; even, perhaps, enhanced. Years of the reading tour had strengthened his voice, and taught him a great deal about phrasing and communication. He knew, in fact, a great deal about acting. But the
need
– that had gone. Not the need to perform; that was a strong and continuing imperative. What had gone was the need to reveal himself – to own up. The need to transform was gone, too. He was at last someone in whom he could believe, someone he could almost like. How deep that self-reconciliation went is hard to say, but at least now when he wanted to escape from himself, he did so by assuming the well-known, well-respected form of ‘Charles Laughton’, public person, rather than descending into the amorphous sludge of his inner darkness, hoping perhaps to catch a monster or two, and take the pressure off. His ‘alliance with the void’ (Cocteau’s phrase) was off; now he was for the light.

Young Bess
belongs to this period, too: a Coronation special, it again starred Stewart Granger, poor chap, and Jean Simmons. Charles betrays no resentment at going over the old ground, and gives a good, straightforward performance as Young Bess’s father, Henry VIII, very restrained in the death scene, full of fire and bluster elsewhere.
What
is inevitably missing is the sense of discovery and liberation of the earlier performance. This is simply the good work of a very good actor in a dull film, directed competently enough by George Sidney, master of musicals and costume romps. Perhaps the impending Royal Event took some of the
oomph
out of his attack; perhaps the producing presence of Sidney Franklin (erstwhile director of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
) dampened things down a bit. The script could certainly have been no inspiration to anyone, though for buffs it is amusing to note that it was co-written by Arthur Wimperis, one of Biró’s collaborators on
The Private Life of Henry VIII
.

If
Young Bess
took Laughton back twenty years, his next project – immediately after the opening of
John Brown’s Body
– took him back yet another ten, to the very beginnings of his acting life. David Lean was to direct
Hobson’s Choice
for Alexander Korda, and there was an enthusiastic exchange of cables across the Atlantic between director and actor. Korda hadn’t seen or spoken to Laughton since the
I, Claudius
fiasco, though they had an exchange of letters. ‘My dear Charles,’ wrote Korda, sharply, ‘Nothing could please me more than having a letter from you after so many years. I have never stopped having affectionate memories of you and I was really profoundly touched to know that you were thinking of me again. Let’s hope that you will not need another letter from somebody else to remind you of a friendship which I shall never forget.’ He then wearily refused Charles’ request to do something for a young man of his acquaintance: ‘Alas, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do something for all these young people who, dissatisfied with their lot, want to start working in the film industry’. During shooting, he kept his distance from Laughton. Lean, however, was enchanted with his star. A famously unsentimental man, known for his impatience with actors (‘I don’t really like actors much – I mean, I like having
dinner
with them, but working is another matter’, he told Richard Attenborough), he nevertheless had the greatest regard for Laughton, having been at the old Gaumont studios while Charles was shooting
Wolves
, his first film. The pains to which Laughton then went for verisimilitude (it was a fight scene) impressed Lean deeply, as did his ability to fill the frame. He regarded – and regards – Laughton as what a star should be, and is particularly fond of his performance in
Hobson’s Choice
, one of his favourite among his own films. It is hard to share this feeling.