The Happy Ham

(See Cover)

More, than half a million Americans during the past year have been bewitched by the Devil. This particular Devil is a jovial old party who wears a rumpled dinner jacket over his generous paunch, and sports no horns or tail. His glance, though sometimes leering, is never demoniac, and he talks about Heaven and Hell with a twinkle, like a fat, fond uncle.

The Devil's name is Charles Laughton, and he speaks of Heaven and Hell in the 50-year-old words of George Bernard Shaw. Next week, as Laughton brings Shaw's Don Juan in Hell on its third trip into Manhattan for an eight-week run, he enjoys the satanic satisfaction of a man who has confounded the experts, given a new theatrical trend a tremendous boost, and turned the old pastime of reading aloud into a booming big business.

The touring Don Juan has already piled up gross profits of more than $1,000,000. When it was interrupted three months ago to let the cast do some movie acting, Charles Laughton went off on a solo tour, to give readings from the Bible, Aesop and Dickens. Six weeks later he pocketed $90,000 of the $164,000 gross. Laughton says complacently: "Contrary to what I'd been told in the entertainment industry, people everywhere have a common shy hunger for literature."

Shining Sticks. With Don Juan in Hell, Laughton is tossing a sizable bone to the culture-starved. Don Juan, the seldom-played third act of Shaw's Man and Superman, is a dream sequence that is short on dramatic action and two hours long on Shavian talk about sex, marriage, war & peace, science, religion, literature, politics and man's fate. Before it was tried by Laughton and the other talented members of the cast (Charles Boyer, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Agnes Moorehead), Don Juan had never had a major U.S. production. "The longest theatrical aside in the history of the drama," it was regarded as fitter for the library than the stage. Shaw himself conceded that it would never be successfully played because "they . . . will think it nothing but a pack of words."

But audiences throughout the U.S.--in Oakland, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Syracuse and Williamsport, Pa.--have been eating it up. Businessmen and bobby-soxers, college students and clubwomen have jammed theaters and auditoriums and high-school gymnasiums to hear the Devil and Don Juan swap epigrams and arguments. As the grosses mounted, the show-business weekly, Variety, headlined: "STICKS OUTSHINE BROADWAY."

Other actors jumped aboard the bandwagon: Tyrone Power got ready to tour with Poet Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body; Sarah Churchill and Edward Thommen headed west to read the letters of Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw; Emlyn Williams arrived from London with the novels of Charles Dickens under his arm. One might have thought the movies, radio and television had never been invented, and that the golden years of the Chautauqua circuit* were back again.

French Accent. Besides playing in Don Juan, Charles Laughton staged and cast it. At first, he had trouble signing up Charles Boyer, who was afraid his French accent might make a hash of the long set speeches. "All right, Charles," said Laughton, "please recast the show for me and find someone else to do Don Juan." The delicate compliment did the trick. Says Laughton: "The public forgets that Boyer was a great actor before he ever became a romantic lead in movies."

Boyer is also a great hypochondriac. During most of the first tour, he kept constant check on his temperature with two thermometers. Sometimes he even sneaked one on stage, concealed it behind his hand and took his temperature between lines. Once, Agnes Moorehead threw him a sudden, unexpected cue, and Boyer had to sputter the thermometer out of his mouth before returning to his role of the Great Lover.

Laughton's most difficult problem, triumphantly solved, was the staging of Don Juan. The tours were a hopscotch of one-and two-night stands, often hundreds of miles apart. The stages were anything from a banquet hall to a fraternal temple. There was no use carrying elaborate settings or props; there might not be adequate lights or even a curtain.

For a time, Laughton fiddled with plans to bathe each actor in a pool of light, or to sit them on ladders with enormous trains of cloth. He finally settled for simplicity. Recalling the "drama" of intent musicians turning the pages of their scores as they play, he perched the actors on high stools, got four music stands and four outsized, green-bound scripts to place on each stand. There is no curtain. Laughton merely walks on stage, makes a few pleasant, informal remarks, and introduces the other players. They get on their stools, open their books, and the play begins.

What the audience sees is not really simplicity, however, but deep theatrical cunning. Only gradually--and sometimes not at all--do theatergoers become aware that the cast is acting, without seeming to act. "Every movement of the body, even the turning of the pages, becomes important," explains Laughton. "You mustn't move, except for a startling effect." As the tempo increases, an actor will slip from his stool and move to center stage in time for his big prose "aria." As theater-wise Director Jed Harris pointed out: "By appearing to read, but actually knowing their parts by heart, they make the whole thing come alive. In a theatrical production, the power of illusion would be much more difficult." Playwright J. B. Priestley, who saw the show in Brooklyn, was inspired to write the actors a new play. "I got excited about it. I saw that there was in it the basis of a new form. You couldn't call it drama--perhaps heightened debate or oratory."

Caught In the Closet. Charles Laughton's love of the theater took a quarter-century to find its outlet. He was born in 1899 in the Victoria Hotel in Scarborough, a resort town on the east coast of England. As the eldest of the three sons of hotel-owning Robert and Elizabeth Laughton, he was supposed to follow in their footsteps. But Charles showed his inclination early. He played endlessly with a toy puppet show until his brother Tom, who had built a guillotine out of a camera shutter, beheaded the marionettes. Laughton's next theatrical disaster came at the age of eight: his mother surprised him in a large linen closet, where, dressed in pillowslips and sheets, he was performing dramatic solos before a captive audience of one entranced pantrymaid.

At Stonyhurst College, Charles landed a part in a school play. His first press notice read, in its entirety: "We hope to see some more of Mr. Laughton." Others hoped to see less. A Scarborough neighbor described the adolescent Charles: "He was one of the most ungainly schoolboys I ever saw, very fat, with a huge head, and a little cap. We should dearly have liked to have kicked him . . ."

After Stonyhurst, Charles was sent to London, to learn hotelkeeping at Claridge's. He spent most of his spare time, and all his money, at the theater; he managed to see Chu-Chin-Chow 13 times. In World War I, Laughton was a private by choice ("Something told me I might not be the kind of fellow to take command of men under fire"), was gassed and invalided home. He spent the next five years in Scarborough, ostensibly working in his family's hotel; actually, he was hanging about amateur theatricals. His persistence paid off. His family gave in, and made him a small allowance. Charles went to London again and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Horrible Higgins. He arrived, says a fellow student, as "a great lout of a fellow with a North Country accent, who couldn't find his hat because he was sitting on it." But when Laughton began to recite, he ceased to be a figure of fun: he held the room spellbound. For his portrayal of Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion, he won the academy's highest award. Shaw dropped in on one rehearsal and commented: "Young man, you were horrible as my Higgins, but nothing will stop you from getting to the top of the tree in a year."

Shaw knew an actor when he saw one. Within twelve months Laughton appeared in eight West End plays, and kept on climbing. In 1929 he married Elsa Lanchester, who had played his secretary in Arnold Bennett's Mr. Prohack. Elsa, a redhead, was the toast of the Bloomsbury intellectuals. She had danced with Isadora Duncan, was part-owner of a hole-in-the-wall nightclub, and was getting tired of being called "elfin." In her elfin book, Charles Laughton and I, Elsa says they first became interested in one another when they discovered that, though ordinarily gabby, they were practically dumb when they were alone together.

Whose Movie? Laughton reached Broadway in Payment Deferred (1931), a grim little drama that won more critical praise than public favor. He followed it with a flop, The Fatal Alibi, but by that time he had caught the eye of Hollywood scouts, and was signed to make The'Devil and the Deep for Paramount. In a crowded Hollywood restaurant, the Laughtons were set upon by Tallulah Bankhead, who roared: "Dahling! I hear you're going to be in my movie!" There were other slights. When the Hollywood eye first lit on Laughton, the Hollywood voice said: "Who's the fat man?" Elsa, even more of an unknown than her husband, spent her time examining what she called the "late Marzipan" architecture of Southern California.

But Laughton in The Devil and the Deep made an impression--even on Hollywood. He was offered the role of Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, and followed with star parts in If I Had a Million, Island of Lost Souls, and the movie version of Payment Deferred (Elsa's role in it was given to Maureen O'Sullivan, and dejected Elsa went back to England; she returned later and has been outstanding in numerous character parts, notably in Come to the Stable and The Big Clock). In the next decade Laughton became the movies' top character actor in such box-office smashes as The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Ruggles of Red Gap, Les Miserables, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

At the very height of his movie career, Laughton abandoned the screen for six months to act with the small, serious-minded Old Vic company in London for -L-20 a week. This disinterested gesture produced an artistic failure that still rankles, for though Laughton threw himself passionately into the role of Macbeth, he admits now that he "stank it up." Flora Robson, who played Lady Macbeth, thinks he had all the intensity needed for Shakespeare, but no feeling for the poetry: "He just rolled it out like a steamroller."

Laughton has figured out this failure by now: "I was not told about the iambic pentameter and I tried to make sense of Shakespeare and that will not do. What you do is to listen to Shakespeare and obey his rules, one of his rules is the iambic pentameter, and if you are lucky and have an ear Shakespeare will make sense of you."

But if Shakespeare eluded him, Hollywood did not. The Laughtons became thoroughly acclimated to California, and planned to become U.S. citizens (a goal they reached in 1950). Then came World War II, and the Battle of Britain. They hurried to a British consulate to ask how they could help, and were told to stay where they were. In 1940 their London flat was bombed out. Both feel, uneasily, that the British public has never quite forgiven them for sitting out the war in the U.S.

During the war years, Laughton was restless. He tried to lose himself in his collection of art (Renoir, Cezanne, Utrillo), and in organizing classical jam sessions. Then he began dropping into U.S. Army hospitals, where he read aloud from Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Aesop, Thomas Wolfe, the Bible. Says Laughton: "The men in the hospital, unlike the people in the theaters, when they didn't understand said so out loud and if I didn't understand either I learned to admit it . . . And when I did understand and they did not, I knew I wasn't doing it right and wrestled with it until they did . . ." The attention he got from the wounded soldiers first led Laughton to suspect that a lot of Americans want more than comic books in their literary diet. He passionately urges people to read to each other at home (see box). He is convinced that it is the sort of shared experience that draws families and friends closer together.

Man in a Bar. Three years ago, Laughton did his reading on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town TV show. At the moment he went on the air, a young man named Paul Gregory happened to drop into a Manhattan bar. He stared entranced at the bar's TV set as Laughton .dramatized his readings by balletlike turnings of his heavy body, ducking his dewlapped chin into his collar, shooting sly glances from his spaniel-sad eyes. Greatly excited, Gregory phoned Laughton at his hotel, went up to see him the next afternoon, and stayed long into the night. By the time he left, he had convinced Laughton that he should go on a cross-country tour and make people pay to hear his readings.

Gregory's career had been almost the reverse of Laughton's. A remarkably handsome young man, Gregory complains that people were always trying to make an actor of him and ignoring his undeniable talents for business and organization. After bit parts in movies and radio, he had finally got the sort of job he wanted, as a concert manager for Music Corporation of America.

Laughton's solo reading tours were made under M.C.A. sponsorship, but 30-year-old Gregory quit his job and went into business for himself to manage the First Drama Quartette (which plays Don Juan in Hell). He claims that his four prima donnas display surprisingly little temperament. Laughton, says Gregory, "has a reputation for being difficult, and he can be extremely difficult. But Charles and I work very well together." Agnes Moorehead and Cedric Hardwicke have the controlled emotions of veteran troupers. The only near blowup was caused by Boyer, who got a case of nerves during the chaotic train and plane rides of a series of one-night stands. Boyer called in Gregory and announced that he was quitting. Gregory silkily assented, but added, as an afterthought, that the instant Boyer left he would be served with a $100,000 lawsuit for breach of contract. With Gallic practicality, Boyer calmed down.

Terrible to Terrific. The success of Laughton's readings has revived a critics' wrangle over the quality of his acting. Opinions range, as they always have, from terrible to terrific. One noted Broadway director calls him "100% true-blue ham." But British Cinemogul Sir Alexander Korda insists that Laughton is a genius. "He has a feverish will for being superlatively good, a wonderful sincerity.''

Fellow actors are apt to give him bad marks in technique, but they are impressed by his ability to immerse himself in a role, study it, think about it, live it. When he played Rembrandt, he read every scrap he could find about the painter, down to details on what kind of brushes artists used in the 17th century. As the domineering father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, he became intolerably high & mighty around his own home. When he acted the murderer in Payment Deferred, he got so morose he nearly had a nervous breakdown. Says Korda of these soul struggles: "What he needs is not a director but a midwife."

It is this passion for living his parts that has led his wife to call Laughton "a gifted amateur." Charles shrugs agreement: "Why not? After all, amateur means lover,* doesn't it? I see no reason why a professional shouldn't love his work as much as a hobbyist loves his."

Proust to Plato. Offstage, the Laughtons live a quietly busy life in a small (for Hollywood), eleven-room house that has little ground of its own but, happily, faces on 50 acres of a neighbor's orchards. Elsa works steadily at her non-paying job with Hollywood's Turnabout Theater (TIME, May 24, 1948), and shuttles between nightclub engagements in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Charles has rearranged their living room into a studio where he trains the dedicated and largely unknown young actors of the Charles Laughton Players. When he goes to bed, he surrounds himself with books (from Proust to Plato) and samples them as a dowager might a box of chocolates. When a friend chided him for being self-consciously highbrow, Laughton replied simply: "You've got to remember that I was brought up in a country pub, that all my people were hotelkeepers, and that I'm just coming into the world of culture."

Laughton is diffident with strangers, impatient with fools, and warmly loyal to his friends. Agnes Moorehead describes him as "a big bear with a big, pink, plush heart." His passion for flowers is so great that he will walk miles to see the spring's first crocus. In the gardens of Chapel Hill, N.C., he was so moved by the budding of narcissi and daffodils that he cried. Laughton's personal untidiness upsets some of his friends, but one of them, Actor Arthur Macrae, thinks it more deliberate than careless: "After all, Charles is a funny-looking sort of fellow, and he knows it. There's no sense trying to have an air of an 18th century courtier when you look like that." Laughton, even blunter about his appearance, says flatly: "I have a face like the behind of an elephant."

Tired but Happy. The readings have given a healthy push to Laughton's career. He is signed for at least four new movies (including one with Abbott & Costello), and this week begins a new radio series for the American Medical Association. He has enough reading projects to keep him busy for a decade. He intends to find time for another assault on Shakespeare : his great ambition is to do a really bang-up performance of King Lear, but he doesn't yet feel ready for the part. Tentatively scheduled for this fall is another reading tour based on James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times.

Laughton regards himself as overworked, but very happy. And he is proud of the remark Elsa made when he got home after one of the grueling tours with Don Juan. "Charles," she said, "you look very tired--and 15 years younger!"

* Chautauqua began in 1874 as a summer training camp for Methodist Sunday-school teachers. When cultural lectures were added to the religious curriculum, thousands flocked to the outdoor "God's temple" on the shores of New York's Lake Chautauqua. After the turn of the century, lecturers, singers, Swiss bell-ringers, dramatic troupes and dancers were touring a circuit of 200 Chautauquas in 31 states. In 1924, Chautauqua's peak, summer brought brown Chautauqua tents to 12,000 towns. More than 30 million people heard such singers as Galli-Curci and John McCormack, such politicians as Al Smith, Senator Bob La Follette and Socialist Eugene Debs. Russell H. Conwell gave his famous "Acres of Diamonds" speech nearly 6,000 times, and another spellbinder, William Jennings Bryan, was able to draw "40 acres of parked Fords." Movies and radio combined to finish off Chautauqua: in 1925 it quickly and quietly faded away.

* Etymologist Joseph Shipley concurs, but also points to a close relationship between amateur and ham. Amateur stems from the Latin, amare, to love. The cockney version--h'amateur was later blended with Hamlet (a play that is often "h'amateurly" performed), to coin the actor's meaning of ham.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.