Charles Laughton (51 page)

‘How they tormented each other!’ said Don Bachardy who knew them, at one remove, through Christopher Isherwood, and who preferred to keep it at one remove, ‘but they were perfectly innocent that this is what they were doing.’ They had become locked into a cycle of mutual cruelty which was synonymous with being alive. ‘You must not upset me ever again,’ said Laughton triumphantly, after his heart attack, ‘it’s the old ticker.’ He evidently felt that he had scored a very high match point. He resented her apparent licence to criticize him, which, with the souring of their relations, she used indiscriminately and with the accuracy bred of a lifetime’s close observation. She was like the little bird who lives on the hippopotamus, except that instead of ridding him of insects, she was now drawing blood. Her instinct to protect him had become perverted into aggression; but the starting point was, without question, love.

They were united by certain common tastes, and by common requirements; they were divided by talent, temperament and sexual inclination. Lanchester was a lightweight, almost a flyweight, as a performer: ‘I suppose you might call what I do vaudeville,’ she wrote of herself, ‘making a joke, especially impromptu, and getting a big laugh for it, is just plain heaven.’ Once she started to work at the Turnabout Theatre in Los Angeles, and more particularly when she had
Elsa Lanchester – Herself
, she returned to the kind of material in which she was pre-eminent; it was a tiny kingdom of which she was queen, but it was all her own – as a sort of off-colour Joyce Grenfell, or a Bea Lillie without the genius. In between her days at the Cave of Harmony and this later incarnation, came the years as ‘Mrs Charles Laughton,’ in which she was made by Hollywood, and indeed, by Pommer and by Korda, to feel out of her husband’s league. It is not quite clear to what extent Laughton tried to promote her, but the very fact that she would need ‘promotion’ must have been unbearable to her. She later expressed her conviction that she and Charles had been driven apart by ‘professional separaters,’ and it is significant that most of the people on the list are producers. Even when Charles devised and directed her show, there seemed to be some deep-seated professional tension between them: he chose the occasion of her first touring date for
Elsa Lanchester – Herself
to attempt to kill himself. ‘Filled with tension and hostility and determined to break through his fit of depression, I slapped his face. Charles became silent and said simply, ‘Thank you’ … I think I said, ‘You are trying to kill my show. You want to destroy it and me. How can I possibly stand on that stage and
be
light and cheerful as if nothing had happened!’ Charles said something like ‘Yes … maybe … I’m sorry.’ Even on the first preview itself, there had been a complicated emotional atmosphere: ‘The audience was very enthusiastic, and I took a number of curtain calls. Charles, out front, suddenly leapt from his seat and ran to the back of the auditorium and pounded on the locked door, trying to get in backstage. Finally someone let him in and Charles rushed through the stage curtains to take a bow – but by this time the audience had left … now that he saw how successful our show would be, he impulsively wanted recognition for it.’

Elsa Lanchester wrote a book, very vividly. Laughton never did. (He started to dictate his autobiography to Bruce Zortman: the notes for it – considerably more of them than Lanchester implies – are simply a series of cryptic glimpses of his early life.) The Lanchester Version is the official one. She doesn’t paint herself in angelic terms, but her every action is justified and annotated; Charles’ remain bare, without benefit of advocate.

She makes very clear, however, that there was a vast temperamental gap between them, although their differences could be said to be complementary: he with his limitless capacity for being hurt, she with her strange gift (noted from her earliest days) for the apt barb. He with his huge emotional response, for and against; she, as her cousin in a memorable burst of familial invective described her, ‘like the frostbitten Lanchesters of whom you are a fit scion’; he evasive, she blunt to a fault; he dreading thunderstorms, she loving them; his epic canvas, her miniature frame. To begin with, these differences were refreshing; with time they became a source of almost continuous aggravation on both sides, though it must be said in Elsa’s defence that she looked after him when he was dying, and it is inconceivable that he would have done the same for her. Despite several threats of divorce (originating with him, and swiftly scotched by her) there was never any serious prospect of their breaking up.

Of course the relationship was useful to both of them; Charles was particularly anxious that they should be seen to be together. When he discovered that by chance they were in New York at the same time, he with
Don Juan in Hell
and staying at the Plaza, she just returned from a European tour, in a room at the Algonquin, he told her, ‘Look, Elsa, for God’s sake, get in a cab and come here at once! This situation must not get out to the press. We’ll have to go out and be seen everywhere together.’ She also functioned as a kind of running joke in his interviews – a kind of she-who-must-be-obeyed figure, with a no-but-seriously
implication
that they led a life of hum-drum domesticity.

Which, of course, could hardly have been further from the truth.

Early in 1930, they had married. It was not an event of any great significance, insofar as they had been living together, in the modern manner, for over two years. The wedding took place in a registry office, unobserved by the pressmen who had been sleeping on their doorstep in anticipation of the event (
such
was their fame). Elsa attributes the marriage to Charles’ desire to please his ever-formidable mother. (Indeed, the elder Mrs Laughton and Charles’ delicate youngest brother Frank accompanied them on their honeymoon. ‘My friends thought it was hilarious.’) Elsa implies that the further seal of respectability was not entirely unwelcome to Charles, too. They were still living in digs-like accommodation in Soho. Their style remained semi-Bohemian.

They were spoken of and written of very much as ‘a couple’ – a famous eccentric match. Ethel Mannin interviewed them jointly under the heading ‘Portrait of a Strange Pair.’ Her ‘Impression’ conveys a certain unease in their company which was a common response.

‘We are both naturally restrained,’ he said, ‘because we’re both self-conscious knowing that you’ve come to see us specially to write about us. How could you expect us to be anything else?’ I could only reply that if their present exuberance was to be regarded as restraint, then normally, when they are alone, a sort of riot must take place … The last I saw of this strange pair was when they stood with their arms about each other … Elsa’s tiny face … and Laughton’s pale puffy face, pressed ‘cheek to cheek’, saying goodbye and bidding me come to see them. ‘In our untidy little flat.’ ‘It’s only a
little
flat, but
we’re
fond of it!’ As I emerged, I thought of some of the ‘impossible’ things Elsa had said, and of Laughton’s irrepressible bursts of acting, and the story of the young woman who sat at the piano ‘in ’er nood’ came into my head, and the verdict on that young woman seemed somehow to apply to the odd pair I had left. ‘No, not mad, my dear, but
strainge
, I grant yew …’

They seem to have been performing their relationship. There can be no doubt that there was a real bond between them, a magnetic pull, which endured for over thirty years, but its exact nature, as so often, is hard to pin down. Neither socially, sexually, intellectually, or temperamentally did they seem to have any affinity: only a mutual – but quite different – oddity seems to have brought them together; that, and loneliness. It’s almost as if they had been yoked together by
fate
, and somehow made the most of it – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They both found the existence of the other useful, not merely as a cover for whatever other activities, but as a public point of reference: ‘I asked Elsa if I could,’ he’d say, while she’d joke about his scruffiness: to present themselves as ‘a husband and wife’ and thus give their audience something to hang on to. To normalise themselves.

To what extent during these early years they were trying to pretend to themselves that they were well matched is hard to gauge. We only have Elsa’s evidence. But even that seems to point towards a certain strain of unreality. She describes his exaggerated resentment of her going off for an early film-call: and of him suddenly bursting into her dressing-room during the run of a play, expecting to find the romantic lead, Derrick de Marne, in there with her: ‘this dramatic suspicious entrance was more like cheap melodrama than flattering.’

Intellectually, they were poles apart. Elsa with her quick, bright brain, formed by the combative political encounters of her parents, sharpened by her experience in revue, reducing things to size and piercing pomposity with her sharp little pins – Charles, with his much less nimble wits, constantly circling round and round ideas, approaching them clumsily, perhaps, becoming ponderous and pretentious, but always searching (‘one feels,’ reported Ethel Mannin, ‘the galvanic working of his mind the whole time, so that being with him is rather like being all the time in the engine-room with all the engines running’). Her chief means of communication was raillery: tremendous fun if you were sure of yourself and in the mood, but apt to make you feel put down, sent up, and finally pissed-off, if you weren’t. She was, according to her friends of the period, ‘the quickest, wittiest, most mercurial
bitch
you could ever hope to meet. She couldn’t help herself. The darts just flew out of her mouth.’

It is hard to think of a worse companion for the awkward, self-conscious, self-doubting, boy-man that Laughton was. He was capable of giving as good as he got, no mistake, and savage blows may well have issued from the mess that was boiling and bubbling within.

Some sexual unsatisfactoriness was noticed by others, too. ‘I assumed that they weren’t very sexually involved,’ said Benita Armstrong, Elsa’s best friend of the period, ‘from the way they never left each other alone in public. They were always
mauling
each other.’ The gimlet eye of Miss Mannin dwelt on this aspect of things, as well. ‘Laughton laughed and said he wished someone would say of him that he had sex appeal … then he sprang up and embraced Elsa declaring
that
she was the only woman who had found any sex-appeal in him … Elsa reassured him, tenderly; she said that the women were ‘mad about him’ in
The Silver Tassie
, and he seemed comforted.’

Over that between-shows supper at the Perroquet, Emlyn Williams had smiled at Charles’ ‘noisy jokes, some of them slanted towards sex, an area in which I sensed complexity.’

Not so Elsa, apparently.

Once the sexual bomb had fallen, the pattern for their lives was established – the marriage would continue, but they would go their separate ways. This pattern was never articulated by either partner, but, once the marriage had survived the initial impact, it was no doubt inevitable. It was not, however, quite as simple as that; it rarely is. The shock to Elsa must have been enormous: she ceased, as she says, to trust Charles from that moment because she had been deceived. She no longer wanted a child by him, either. Their sexual relations quickly cooled. It looks as if the brittle young woman that she was when she married him had rather unexpectedly found herself falling in love with him, only to be made brittle all over again. It is to be doubted whether his emotional centre was ever really heterosexually oriented (there is no evidence whatever of any other liaison with a woman, before or after Elsa) but he did deeply want to have children. In later years he reproached her with her refusal to have any, and formed a number of strong friendships with various young actresses: Maureen O’Hara, Deanna Durbin, Margaret O’Brien, Maureen O’Sullivan – father–daughter relationships. This longing of his may have contributed yet another layer to the opaque texture of his Lear; and Elsa failing Charles as a mother, and Charles failing Elsa as a lover contributed a layer to the opaque texture of their life together, too.

Immediately after Charles’ confession to her of his homosexual self, and just before rehearsals for
Payment Deferred
started, Jeffrey Dell, the play’s adaptor, and his wife took Charles away with them for a brief holiday in Salzburg. Elsa refused to join them, hating the pretence of a second honeymoon, as she put it. Laughton wrote her a miserable letter on the back of his hotel bill. ‘Elsa my beloved’ it starts, and continues ‘Through these last two days when we have arrived at our hotel in the evening, in the mornings, and in fact at all times when I have been alone, the refrain has been going through my head: “She’s married a bugger, she’s married to a bugger, she’s married to a bugger,” and then you saying to me, “and to think this has happened to me,” as you did once. And I know Elsa what matters most in life to me is to face it with you. I don’t care and I know now I
never
will care so much as I did about doing but only about being … our parting at Victoria was a very sad one this time darling, wasn’t it? We seemed to be reaching out to each other all the time inside. Ever since I left you the side that belongs to you has been sad and listless.’

The externalisation of their separate sexual development did not occur till the beginning of the forties, theirs and the century’s. There may have been sexual encounters for Laughton before then, but if so, they must have been fleeting: his work schedule in the thirties was almost unimaginably packed. He began to discover the sexual possibilities of his chauffeurs and masseurs and batmen, and then, it would appear, when he started the reading tours, he became insatiable, a phenomenon which often overcomes men who feel cheated of their sexual youth. ‘Charles was aggressive as a homosexual … he made it more difficult for himself, too, because he wasn’t content to have one, he’d have a ménage of them,’ Paul Gregory told Barry Norman. ‘Some of them would end up in prison and you’d get calls from wardens and letters threatening him … they were the dregs, low class kind of people … he’d got this Higgins complex. They’d come and go. I didn’t have too much to do with all that except to write the cheques for him and hide them from Elsa and his accountants.’ Nothing Paul Gregory says should be accepted without corroborative evidence, but in this case there is plenty to suggest that Laughton required frequent refutation of his sense of undesirability. At the same time the ‘Higgins complex’ led him to form different kinds of relationships, often with young men who were bi-sexual and whom he tried to teach; this was his ideal relationship. His sense of physical inferiority often led him into somewhat masochistic connections, socially at any rate. Elsa describes one such set-up: ‘While Charles was performing at Town Hall, I went out and returned later to the hotel to wait for him. There were full ashtrays in the room and too many glasses from earlier in the day, so I started to clean up, to put them all on a tray. As I was doing this, Charles marched into the room with his road man. Charles was carrying a load of heavy books, and also his overcoat. The road man, arms empty, was munching on a snack. I said to the young man, ‘Don’t you ever carry the books when Charles is tired?’ … He said, ‘No’, quite simply … I felt quite angry. I stood there with a tray in my hands and said to the young man, ‘You should be doing this.’ He looked up at me and answered, ‘I don’t see why.’ So I threw the trayful of glasses and ashtrays right into his stomach.’