Charles Laughton by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448156474
Publisher: Random House

Brecht

‘IT WAS SOON after returning to Santa Monica in March 1944 that Brecht met Charles Laughton, who fell in love with him,’ states Ronald Hayman, unequivocally. Salka Viertel, at whose house in Maybery Road they met, writes that Laughton was ‘hypnotised’ by Brecht. Conversely, James K. Lyon in his definitive Bertolt Brecht in America describes Laughton as ‘the single most important person for Brecht in his American exile’.

Certainly they fell on each other with the passion of two people who want something only the other can give, something desperately desired and long lacked: in Brecht’s case, a production, in Laughton’s, a rôle. Brecht, at this point in his exile, would have collaborated with any star he thought he could hitch a production to (he had been speaking to Luise Rainer, star of The Good Earth, about putting on The Caucasian Chalk Circle – had indeed written it on the basis of her enthusiasm to play in Klabund’s original Chalk Circle) whilst Laughton was pining like some great animal denied proper exercise.

What began as mutual self-interest, however, quickly turned into something infinitely rich and rewarding, both personally and creatively, if not, in the last analysis, professionally.

The very fact that their meeting took place at the Viertels’ salon might have suggested to Brecht that Laughton was not like the common run of American actors; but Laughton, though not easy socially, always wanted to be near artists – painters, composers, poets, playwrights; and Salka Viertel had somehow created a space where that most un-English and largely un-American phenomenon, the community of artists, could flourish. The only other Englishman he might have met there was Chaplin, who knew Laughton well, but with him, much as he admired his comedic techniques, Brecht could find no rapport. As so often, the admired does not recognise himself in the admirers’ description. Chaplin had no hunger for ideas: he liked to talk, and had, as Norman Lloyd, then a young actor-producer, observed, ‘living-room routines, designed to dazzle.’ Laughton, who had no small talk, would only speak when he had something to say. Brecht was a man of few words, conversationally, but those words were precise, pithy, provocative. Laughton detested cant and pomposity; he loved intelligence and frankness. The authentic voice was what Laughton was always listening for; through the hubbub of the dispossessed intelligentsia of Europe, he must have heard it loud and clear from Brecht’s mouth.

In a very simple sense, the man from Augsburg and the man from Scarborough understood each other. A certain bluntness, a certain cussedness, a penchant for questioning, an impatience with sartorial and social observances were theirs in common – as were capacity and inclination for hard work, admiration of craftsmanship, love of learning. There are further points of connexion: each had a wife who ran the house, while lovers hovered in the background, occasionally awkwardly entering the domestic frame; each was dependent on collaborators, preferring to work in harness than alone; neither had the gift of friendship. There was work and there

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