Charles Laughton Read Free

pressed the record button while playing it back. Meanwhile, her new husband, a Scottish doctor, helpfully informed me that Laughton was sexually insatiable: ‘He was homosexual, you see, and your homosexual is invariably promiscuous: it’s in his nature.’
    Eventually, I had gathered sufficient material to begin writing, at which point Nick Gray from Yorkshire TV called and suggested that it might be interesting to do a TV documentary as well. This was a tremendous bonus because it meant that I could reach certain people that neither a book nor a radio documentary would entice; Robert Mitchum was one of them. In the event, he chose to answer me only in monosyllables, an experience like trying to make small talk with Mount Rushmore. I guessed that a big organisation could provide better facilities for research, particularly in the celluloid sphere, and so it proved. Helen McGee, a celluloid sleuth of genius, tracked down extraordinary things, like a 1930 Movietone News sequence of Laughton making up in his dressing room at Wyndham’s as the Al Capone-like gangster Tony Perelli in his great stage hit
On the Spot
.
    We filmed the documentary as I was writing the book, so new discoveries could be fed from one into the other. I wrote quickly, in Scarborough, where Laughton grew up, in a hotel once owned by his brother, Tom, and having triumphantly delivered the manuscript ahead of time, I went to Los Angeles on a jaunt, taking the proofs with me. One night I found myself at some do or another, dining next to a nice chatty fellow. When I told him about the book he said, ‘Find anything interesting in the Archive at UCLA?’ I looked at him aghast, my mouth working but no words coming out. Finally I croaked, with an insouciant little laugh: ‘Archive?’ ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the Laughton archive.’ I laughed my pearly laugh again and beat a rapid retreat. The next day, I got a cab to UCLA’s leafy campus, ran into the library, and breathlessly requested the Laughton archive. As I sat in the clinical room waiting for it, cold sweat formed on my brow. The door opened and three trolleys were wheeled in containing the twenty-six boxes of the archive. A feverish and rather brutal search revealed to my almost tearful relief that twenty-five of the boxes contained screenplays that Laughton had rejected. The twenty-sixth box contained pure gold – letters from Brecht, Orson Welles, sketches for pieces he was writing, an annotated script for his stage production of
John Brown’s Body
. I made my notes, asked for my photocopies, and ran for dear life. I had warned my publisher, Nick Hern, then at Methuen, to hold the press; I was able to rewrite sufficiently quickly to accommodate what I had just discovered. Saved by the bell.
    The book was, for the most part, very well received. Even then, in 1987, Laughton – once a byword for great acting, universally imitated, and almost universally admired – was beginning to fade in fame, and much of what I had written came as something of a revelation to my readers; the simultaneously-released television documentary was able to show in the flesh what I had attempted to describe on the page.
    Shortly after the book appeared, I began to receive the letters every biographer half dreads and half longs for, pointing out, gently or not, solecisms of one sort or another, most of which I was able to correct in subsequent editions. One of the most remarkable of my correspondents was a then very young woman from Barcelona, Gloria Porta Abad, who evinced an unlikely passion for Laughton, and an even unlikelier persistent scholarship in matters Laughtonian which rather put my whirlwind efforts to shame. She has spent the last twenty-five years slowly unearthing deeply fascinating information about Laughton’s schooldays and his time in the trenches during the First World War, which she has written up in a fine series of articles in impeccable English; she’s even created a website with the