HIS PARENTS COULD NOT AGREE on what to call him. His father, Frederick, wanted a solid English name—William or Harry. And for that matter, what was wrong with Frederick? His mother, Emily, was entranced by the French name Claude, which she had discovered in a romantic novel. It sounded like “cloud,” something elevated and dreamy. Something far away from the grim circumstances of their lives in working-class Clapham, south of the Thames. It wasn't that she expected her child to soar above the ordinary. She just wanted him to live. Of the ten children she had delivered in the same brass bed, seven had died at birth or shortly thereafter. In London during the 1890s, children of the poorest classes stood a twenty percent chance of dying before their first birthday. The public water supply was notoriously unsanitary, and infantile diarrhea, measles, and diphtheria were rife.
Claude rhymed with Maude, the name of one of Emily's children who, with her sister Henrietta, had survived. Maude's name, perhaps, was lucky. Emily was completely unaware that the literal meaning of the name Claude was “lame” or “limping.” She just liked the sound. And it gave her hope.
They finally reached a compromise. Frederick would call the boy William, while his mother would call him Claude.
In the end, they both called him Willie.
William Claude Rains was born November 10, 1889, the first son of Frederick and Emily Eliza Cox Rains. Frederick Rains was very short, a trait he passed on to his son. He was also arrogant, unreliable, pompous, clever, versatile, vain, and as far as Willie was concerned, sadistically cruel. Frederick Rains had descended from a family of substance in the village of Rainham, in Kent, but had somehow never ascended to respectable employment. He was, in fact, constantly in transition between one temporary occupation and another, propelled by opportunity and necessity. He had been a music hall composer and performer, an organ and piano maker, an insurance agent, and, after studying the subject for a week in the public library, a foreman in a boiler factory. He was discharged from the latter position (as he was from most) for being more knowledgeable than the people who employed him—or so he always maintained. He was also active as a performer in the early British film industry. His New York Times obituary in 1945 claimed, quite impossibly, that he had appeared in over eight hundred silent films. It was either a typographical error or grandiosity on an egregious scale.
In any event, the child who would become one of the most revered character actors in the history of motion pictures showed no interest in the burgeoning art form when it was being introduced in London at the turn of the century, quite possibly because of his animosity toward his father and anything he might be involved with. Until Claude Rains actually acted in his first film he claimed, implausibly, that he had never even seen one.
The boy's memories of his father would always be colored by the man's extremes. He could be the expansive host, playing the piano after dinner in a lordly way, with grand flourishes, bellowing songs like one that ended, “…and things seem all awry / Some get all and some get naught / Egad, I wonder why.” An occasional vaudevillian, Frederick performed his own songs in music halls and, for Christmas pantomimes, cross-dressed as a grand dame, an annual role he played with relish.
Frederick could also be a merciless dispenser of punishment, lashing his son with a leather strap in the garden tool shed while his mother's face floated, like some disembodied mask, in the flat's rear window. More than a half century later, Rains would remember his mother crying, “Oh, Fred, don't hurt him, Fred, please don't hurt him.”
But Fred went on hurting him. Rains's earliest memory of corporal punishment was when he was four or five. His mother had presented him with an extravagantly expensive Lord Fauntleroy–style velvet suit, but, in his excitement over the gift and his mother's overflowing delight at the sight of her boy wearing the outfit, he soiled it.
Frederick came home to find the trousers he had paid for drying on the clothesline.
“What's that?” he demanded.
“Willie had an accident,” explained his mother.
“Oh, he did, did he?” thundered Frederick, unbuckling his belt.
“I may have been a difficult little boy,” Rains would say decades later, perhaps searching for a reason for the harsh treatment. “Those beatings may have been good for me.” He was always stoic under his father's thrashings; he never made a sound. He also never trusted his father or bonded with him in any way.
The family moved often, as Frederick's fortunes flowed and ebbed. One of Rains's more pleasant childhood memories was his riding on the tailgate of yet another horse-drawn moving wagon. Wherever the Rains family lived, whether in one of Clapham's neat brick row houses with their window boxes or amid the lesser architecture of nearby Brixton, redeemed by the golden curbside border of laburnum trees, they never sacrificed their emblems of respectability—a scrubbed doorstep, polished brass hardware on the front door, and always a paper fan in the grate when a fire was not burning.
Emily sometimes carried the façade of respectability to the brink of embarrassment. Sunday dinner with a joint of lamb or beef was a ritual as often as it was economically possible, and there were always guests—neighbors or Frederick's occupational associates. After dessert, when Emily had cleared the table, she never failed to inquire, daintily, “Would anybody like a little cheese?” while the family held its collective breath—because there wasn't any cheese, ever. They couldn't afford it. Mrs. Rains never knew whether her guests simply didn't like cheese, or whether they were aware of her little deception, but tactful enough not to call her bluff. In any event, Claude remembered no one ever asking for cheese.
Emily had no use for hollow pride, however, and she did not hesitate to take in boarders when Frederick failed in his latest venture. These nameless lodgers, a stream of faceless strangers in the dining room, brought more shame to the boy than did the lack of money in the family budget.
Claude Rains's first appearance on the stage came in 1898, soon after the outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa and attendant jingoism at home. He and his playmates, all of them age ten or less, were tramping up and down Brixton Road, brandishing wooden swords and wearing helmets fashioned from newspapers. His sister Henrietta trailed behind, decked out in a white cap and Red Cross armband. The clamor attracted the attention of a local minstrel who was then plying his trade on the stage of a nearby music hall, singing patriotic songs. Seeing opportunity, he traversed the neighborhood for parental permission, then shepherded his little troop off to the music hall as a backdrop for his act. Though functioning as little more than a stage prop, Rains never forgot the exquisite thrill of that first applause.
He had absolutely no conception of the legitimate theatre then; his only exposure to live performance had been the music hall. Nobody, however astute, would ever have spotted in this ungainly child the makings of an actor. For one thing, he had considerable difficulty with ordinary vocal expression. He seldom talked at all at home, instead expressing himself with grunts and gestures that only further irritated his father. One particularly idiotic doctor suggested that they simply starve him until he would finally have to ask for food. When he did manage to form words, he sounded like no one else in the family, his words emerging in a whining Cockney dialect that the boy seemed to have plucked from the streets. (His mother had only a slight working-class accent, and his father, given his privileged upbringing, had a more upper-class cast to his voice.) The boy's speech was further marred by r’s that sounded like w’s; Emily had encouraged a lazy tongue through her reinforcement of her beloved son's baby-talk mannerisms, which she found endearingly “pwetty.” His classmates at the Camberwell Green School thought otherwise. One boy in particular began taunting him publicly as “Willie Wains.” Rains lay in futile wait for his tormentor for days on end, loudly declaring he would thrash him “as sure as God made little apples.” He only succeeded in becoming known for a long time thereafter as “Little Apples.”
For all his checkered career, Frederick Rains still enjoyed a certain luster back in Kent, and he turned to his relatives there when his younger daughter, Henrietta, suffered a prolonged illness. The whole family accompanied the little girl to the rural home of Frederick's cousins, a large and agreeable family that lived in a picturesque cottage along a rustic lane and owned a cherry orchard. When the Rainses returned to London that night, Willie was so envious of his sister's escape to a pastoral nirvana that he vowed to somehow free himself from what he saw as his various forms of bondage, the most onerous being his incarceration at the Camberwell Green School.
He achieved his goal the very next morning, by bribing a classmate to report him ill. The bribe consisted of one of his mother's jam tarts, and, for the next month, he exchanged similarly prized portions of his lunch to maintain a life of truancy.
He might eventually have gone back to school had not the proprietor of a W. H. Smith store near the school offered him a job as a news vendor. He accepted, and not long after began to notice a handsome boy about his own age, wearing an Eton suit and a kind of mortarboard cap, walking by the store two mornings a week. Rains, with an instinct for elegance, or simply a hunger for personal advancement, coveted that suit. One morning he stopped the boy and, engaging him in conversation, received a full explanation. The boy was a member of the choir at the fashionable Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair, and the clothes came with the job.
When the boy offered to take Rains along for an audition, he immediately resigned his news vending job, and the two of them walked the four miles across town to choir practice. The church was on Farm Street, just around the corner from Berkeley Square, and it was familiarly referred to as the Farm Street Church. It was the pastorate of the Reverend Father Bernard Vaughan, an eminent Catholic humanitarian and confidante of London's West End theatre demimonde.
Rains was presented to Alfred Bellew, the choirmaster, and was about to demonstrate his vocal prowess—like many people with speech impediments, he had fewer problems singing than talking—when the door opened and Father Vaughan swept in. Like many successful men of limited height, the dynamic little priest carried himself with a majestic air that suggested greater physical stature. He spied Rains nervously preparing himself to sing and he walked over, patting him approvingly on the head.
“Well, young man,” he said, “why do you want to be a choir boy?”
Rains, who had seldom been in a church of any kind and had no comprehension of Catholicism, was scarcely able to muster a reply. But he did know that coveting a costume was no way to impress such a formidable authority figure, so he blurted out a subsidiary truth, Cockney accent, misshapen r’s, and all:
“Sir, when I sing or recite well at home or in school, I am often given sweets.”
Father Vaughan winced at the diction, laughed at the candor, patted the boy once more on the head, and left.
Bellew ran Rains up and down a simple scale or two, found his thin soprano voice up to Farm Street's standards, assigned him a place in the front row, and issued the coveted Etonian suit. Willie learned the hymns and chants by rote and was immensely moved by the solemn pageantry of the mass. The future seemed all spiritual glitter and wonder.
Once home, he confided his success to his mother, who was skeptical. But the suit was real, the church was known to her, and, after she had attended mass once to confirm her son's story, she shared his pride. Of course, he didn't tell her that he was also an outrageous truant. It wasn't long, however, until she found out.
One morning the boy was loitering around his former place of employment, watching bales of hay being unloaded from a wagon, when his father, making his rounds on a bicycle to collect insurance premiums, loomed over one of the bales.
“Why aren't you in school?” he roared.
“Well, sir,” mumbled Willie, “I, uh, er, can't get past the hay bales.”
“You'll get past!” stormed Frederick, dismounting his bicycle and vaulting the hay bale. Seizing his son by the ear, he tugged him in this fashion most of the way to the school, where he thrust the boy into the classroom like a Roman propelling a Christian to the lions.
“Oh,” said the teacher solicitously. “Is Willie better?”
Thus made aware of Willie's truancy, Frederick beat him unmercifully and told all the policemen in the neighborhood of his son's shocking transgression, so that the remainder of the term was a kind of nightmare. No matter which alley or other obscure thoroughfare Willie sought for an unmolested route to school, a bobby was certain to appear, wag his finger, and mournfully declare, “So you're the little boy who doesn't go to school.”
Rains managed to hold on to his choir position, though not during school hours. One day in August 1900, Bellew, the choirmaster, instructed his charges to bring their lunches to the next practice session. “We're going to the Haymarket,” he explained.
To Rains, this implied some kind of day in the country. Ever since that frustrating excursion to Kent and the cherry orchard, he had longed for the green outdoors. But when the great day came, he found himself with his fellow choirboys dancing around a papier-mâché fountain on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. He was, at least, in rather illustrious company. The play he found himself in was the original production of Paul Kester's Sweet Nell of Old Drury, starring Fred Terry, brother of the legendary actress Ellen Terry, and Terry's wife, Julia Neilsen, who played the title role of Nell Gwyn.
For his bewildering efforts on the Haymarket stage, Rains was paid the magnificent sum of ten shillings, a fortune beyond his grasp, but not beyond the need-driven calculations of his parents, whose financial distress was known by this time to Bellew. Frequently called upon to provide children for various theatrical productions, Bellew arranged for Rains to work as an extra in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of Herod, which occupied the boy for seventy-eight performances at the end of 1900 and the beginning of 1901. Bellew also immediately thought of Willie when he was asked if he knew of a reliable, energetic youngster to work as a call boy at the Duke of York's Theatre. A call boy was responsible for reminding actors of the time remaining before curtain, and for calling places. Few boys had impressed Bellew as much as Rains, whose application toward learning the Catholic liturgy and its music had been exceptional. While Bellew may have had misgivings about suggesting that Willie give up school, he realized that the boy's prospects were likely far brighter in the theatre then as a taunted student adrift in an indifferent educational system.
Accordingly, Bellew approached Rains's parents in the spring of 1902 and proposed that Willie, then twelve years old, carve out a career for himself in the theatre. The proposal came during one of Frederick's downturns in financial fortune, and he and Emily agreed. They wanted their son to be educated, but perhaps he could educate himself. They simply needed the money.
Located in St. Martin's Lane, the Duke of York's Theatre was a handsome, three-tiered playhouse constructed only ten years earlier as the Trafalgar Square Theatre; the name was changed in 1895. The current lessee was the renowned impresario Charles Frohman, who also produced plays on the Continent and in America. The first play to which young Rains provided his services was most likely The Gay Lord Quex by Arthur Wing Pinero, followed by a one-night engagement of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy's Frou Frou, which was squeezing out an extra performance following a sold-out run at the Garrick. Among the cast Rains would have encountered was Sarah Bernhardt, whom he had seen the previous year in Cyrano de Bergerac at Her Majesty's. He didn't recall who had taken him (it was probably Bellew), but Rains later remembered that the production was performed entirely in French. Cyrano had paired France's greatest tragedienne with its greatest comedian, Constant- Benoit Coquelin. “I never understood a word Coquelin said,” Rains recalled, “but he made me weep.” He remembered almost nothing of Bernhardt's performance except her regal presence as Roxanne, but he never forgot an anecdote related to him at the time, likely apocryphal, that the only English word the great Coquelin knew was “lavatory.” Another performance that impressed the boy was that of Sir Henry Irving (recently honored by becoming the first actor to be knighted) in A Story of Waterloo. Irving's death scene was so realistic that Willie was momentarily sure he had seen the actor actually die.
The hours of Rains's employment were long, from noon until nearly midnight, and the pay was ten shillings a week. Seven shillings went to help support the family, and three shillings were allotted to the boy for his expenses, which were sixpence a day. The bus fare, aboard a Balls Brothers tram drawn by four horses, was onepence each way. This left him fourpence for supper, and for this amount he could buy tea and bread and butter, plus a haddock or a pair of kippers. It wasn't enough for a growing boy, and, when midnight came, Willie was often so hungry he would spend his bus fare for additional food and walk the four miles home.
By the time Rains was on his third play at the Duke of York's, For Love of Prim, by Eden Phillpotts, he had attained professional competence. This, coupled with the knowledge that he was helping support his family, gave him unusual self-esteem for his age. It didn't, however, help with his gnawing nighttime hunger. He would have been cold as well, had not Marie Tempest, a brilliant comedienne of the time, taken pity on his threadbare garments and given him a coat with a velvet collar and cuffs.
His next play was The Admirable Crichton, J. M. Barrie's genial poke at Britain's hothouse aristocracy. The star was H. B. Irving, eldest son of Sir Henry Irving. The younger Irving's role involved a number of quick costume changes, requiring his dresser to attend him in the wings rather than in his dressing room. During one performance, Rains passed Irving's cubicle and noticed that the door was ajar. Just beyond the door, a pair of expensive trousers hung on a peg. It was late in the evening, and the boy was hungry. Without even pausing to contemplate his action, he slipped into the room, dipped his hand into Irving's trouser pocket, and extracted a half-crown. It was more than a day's pay. He dined that night on several apples, which he munched happily on the bus, arriving home fairly gorged.
The next night, his foraging in Irving's pocket yielded two shillings and, the following night, a single shilling, which, thanks to the abundance of his earlier thefts, he was able to save. It was still in his pocket the next day when he arrived at the theatre and hung his coat, as usual, in the office of Litchfield Owen, the assistant stage manager.
“Ah there, young Rains,” said Owen, in a rare outburst of cordiality. “How are you?” But from this innocent inquiry there followed a line of increasingly pointed questions, the aim of which was soon apparent to Willie.
“I've noticed,” said Owen, “that you're looking much better lately. Been eating more, I presume. I remember when you had to spend your bus fare for food and then you walked home. But now you've got money.”
Rains could only nod dumbly. “Well,” said Owen, “how much money have you got? Let's have a look.”
His heart thumping, Rains fumbled in his pockets before displaying in his damp palm the remainder of his sixpence allowance and the stolen shilling. Owen took the shilling and held it up to the boy's face. Rains could see that there was a fresh scratch across the face of the coin.
“I'm sorry we had to do this, but we were suspicious. I know why you did it—because you were hungry.” There was a look of compassion on Owen's face, and for an instant Willie hoped forgiveness was in sight. Owen shattered the notion as quickly as it had been born. He beckoned the boy to follow him to the office of Dion Boucicault, the show's producer and one of the West End's more eminent personages. Son of the legendary Irish actor and playwright of the same name, Boucicault was a theatrical force in his own right. As Rains was dragged before him, he could see that the impresario was at his sartorial best, in a black frock coat and striped trousers, his silk hat hanging on a coat tree. He had a formidable countenance that reminded Willie of his father's face, though kinder. After hearing the evidence, Boucicault was soft-voiced but firm.
”Go home,” he said sadly, “and tell your mother that you have become a thief.”
Willie had never permitted himself tears, even under his father's leather strap, and he did not give in now. He begged for a second chance, but in vain.
“No,” said Boucicault. “I don't want to see you any more. If you are not punished now, you will become a criminal.”
In later years Rains would be unable to remember exactly how he related the catastrophe to his mother, but the following day she accompanied him back to the theatre to deliver her own entreaties to Owen and Boucicault, practically kneeling in supplication. When it was all over and Boucicault had given his last refusal, he stepped forward.
“Mr. Owen has a little gift for Willie,” said Boucicault, and into the boy's hand was placed the scarred fruit of his theft. In addition to the scratch, the coin also bore the freshly etched letters HITBP.
“That means ‘Honesty is the best policy,’” explained Owen, as Willie and his sobbing mother were ushered from the room.
The pain of his father's whipping was nothing compared to the shame Rains carried back to school. He dropped out of the Farm Street choir. There was little to relieve the oppressive stigma of his crime, of which his father was only too happy to constantly remind him. He could only wonder how many people, in addition to his parents and his teachers, knew his ugly secret. “I was so ashamed of what I had done, I resolved to die before I would steal again,” Rains later recalled. He would keep the marked coin for decades.
Several months after Rains had left the Farm Street choir, Alfred Bellew unexpectedly summoned his former choirboy. Willie appeared at the church, prepared for some further humiliation, but all Bellew said to him was, “Have you learned your lesson?”
Although Rains had fallen from grace at the Duke of York's, he was still remembered as one of the theatre's more industrious call boys, and Bellew was ready to give him a second chance. The same job was open at the venerable His Majesty's Theatre, which was then run by the illustrious Herbert Beerbohm Tree, second only to Henry Irving as England's leading actor-manager.
Thus, Willie was once more liberated from school. For a time he enjoyed the envy of his former playmates and tormentors. As they trudged off to school, he could remain in bed or spend the morning tending to his prolific menagerie of guinea pigs. While the other boys wrestled with curriculum, Willie strode manfully down Brixton Road to the Bon Marché department store, where he caught a horse-drawn tram to the West End. At his destination, of course, his self-importance shrank, and he became what he really was—a boy compelled by circumstances to work.
He was already familiar with Her Majesty's Theatre, having seen Bernhardt and Coquelin in Cyrano there. He found the theatre itself glamourless. At first he knew nothing of the actors’ reputations or celebrity, having spent almost no time in an audience himself. They were simply strangers he had to work with backstage. They could be majestic, kindly, patronizing, arrogant, demanding, or sometimes drunk. His only comprehension of Tree was that he was a towering man with an equally towering personality. Everybody was afraid of him, always addressing him as “Chief” and referring to him in no less awed terms behind his back.
The son of a London grain merchant and a third-generation Briton of German ancestry, Tree had presided over a dazzling decade at the Haymarket, where he mounted some of the most elaborate (sometimes dismissed as “upholstered”) productions of Shakespeare ever produced in England. He was deeply envious of Henry Irving's knighthood (his own would not be bestowed until 1908), and their rivalry was played out in public and in private. Tree's Hamlet was considered inferior to Irving's, but his Falstaff and Malvolio were recognized as triumphs. Irving was lessee of the Lyceum Theatre, where he held court in a private apartment/dining room known as the Beefsteak Club; at Her Majesty's, Tree built a parallel aerie known as The Dome. Rains later recalled a story that exemplified Tree's antipathy for Irving, as well as his wit. On visiting a stable that provided horses for the stage, the Chief was told that one fine specimen had worked once for Irving. “Only once?” Tree inquired. The stableman explained that the animal had experienced a bout of explosive flatulence in the middle of one of Irving's scenes. “Ah,” quipped Tree. “He was a critic as well as an actor.”
Tree's outstanding commercial success was the 1896 stage adaptation of George du Maurier's best-selling novel Trilby, in which he made the role of Svengali, the mesmeric music master, his own. Rains saw Trilby nightly from the wings when the Chief regularly revived it, and over a half century later would remember it as Tree's finest role. “I couldn't believe my eyes,” he recalled. Du Maurier had personally illustrated his novel in pen and ink, so everyone in London knew exactly what Svengali was supposed to look like. Tree didn't disappoint: he meticulously recreated Svengali's physiognomy with a putty nose and a matted beard, and, as if in homage to the character's graphic roots, drew lines on his face and hands with India ink.
Trilby stunned audiences, and earned enough money for Tree to rebuild and occupy Her Majesty's Theatre, a West End playhouse that had been through multiple incarnations since the eighteenth century. Tree opened his new theatre in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. When Victoria died in 1901 and her eldest son ascended the throne, Tree changed the theatre's name to His Majesty's.
In addition to the customary duties of a call boy at night, Rains also worked as a page boy by day, running errands for the theatre, some on the periphery of Tree's private life. Among his more delicate assignments were delivering messages in one hand to Tree's wife and daughters, and, in the other, gratuities to Tree's mistress in Kensington.
Around the time that Rains became aware of Tree's many indiscretions (he also once encountered the actor in a corridor, casually fondling the bosom of a woman he had just met), the boy himself began to notice the opposite sex. With the help of Willie's steady income, the Rains family moved for a short time north of the Thames to what would be their nicest neighborhood, off Fulham Road on the edge of Chelsea. On his first foray down the block, hoping to impress his contemporaries, Rains spied a fetching, twelve-year-old blonde girl. She was prettily dressed, save for a black armband worn in mourning for a distant kin, and she was surrounded by a handful of Willie's prospective playmates. He eased up to the young lady and, while her more familiar admirers stood back, aghast, demanded a kiss. She was significantly taller than he and glared down at him in contempt. Rejected and humiliated, Rains retreated to the gutter and, in a clumsy attempt to repair his masculine self-image, scooped up a rock and hurled it through a window. A woman named Mrs. Hunt, who lived in the home whose window Rains had broken, immediately summoned his father. Frederick Rains promptly thrashed his son on the front stoop, in full and appreciative view of the blonde girl and her neighborhood retinue. The humiliation was unbearable.
In time, Rains was promoted from call boy to prompter. The promotion was reflected in his paycheck and enabled him, for the first time, to think about more than the basic necessities. It did not, however, give him the opportunity for leisure or fun. His sixty- to seventy-hour workweek at least gave him the grim satisfaction of knowing that he was helping to support his family, an obligation he would carry for much of his life. He also was able to provide his family with some degree of domestic luxury. The first gift Rains remembered buying for his mother was a simple toilet paper holder, reflecting his own resentment over a childhood of paper-littered bathroom floors.
Much of the young man's workday involved his commute. It was a ten-minute walk to the Bon Marché tram stop, and the ride to the West End was at least an hour—along Kensington Road to Westminster Bridge Road, across the Thames, and up Northumberland Avenue to Trafalgar Square. It was a tedious journey, relieved only by the occasional sight of some illustrious figure from the theatre. Rains by then had developed a keen sense of glamour and personal style, and he understood their central importance in the world of the performing arts. Even at the age of fourteen, he was moved by the splendor of Gladys Cooper, who was at the time the rage of London and the most admired actress of the day, walking smartly along Northumberland Avenue on her way to the theatre, the epitome of worldly chic.
Rains was call boy at His Majesty's Theatre for nearly two years, a period during which he became known throughout the West End for his short stature as well as for his energy, eagerness, efficiency, and intelligence. Perhaps above all, though, he was known for his appalling qualities of speech. Actors winced every time they heard him dropping h’s and garbling r’s.
About this time, Willie made the acquaintance of Walter Crichton, a dashing gentleman and the son of Mandel Crichton, the Bishop of London. Crichton occupied a vague position in the Tree organization. The term “public relations” had yet to be coined, but it would well describe much of what he did, guiding Tree's public persona through the quicksands of London society and the press. Like many others, Crichton cringed at Rains's wretched diction, but the young man's diminutive stature and air of waiflike vulnerability elicited a protective response, and Rains found himself drawn increasingly into conversation with the older man.
“What do you read, Willie?” Crichton asked him one day.
“I read the plays, the scripts, sir,” Rains replied.
“I know, I know. But don't you read for yourself?”
“For myself, sir?” The notion was puzzling.
“Yes. To find out about the world.”
Rains had a feeling that his devotion to the illustrated boy's publication Comic Cuts was not what Crichton had in mind. But he replied that the comic paper was what he read.
The next day Crichton gave Rains three books, all by Robert Louis Stevenson: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevannes; A Child's Garden of Verses; and Virginibus Puerisque (“for girls and boys”), a collection of essays. He also gave the boy a dictionary. Rains read the Stevenson books, more to please Crichton than for any other reason, and when he reported that he had finished the three volumes, he was given more.
By the time Rains went on his first tour with Tree's company, through the British and Irish provinces, he was well on his way through the works of William Makepeace Thackeray. On the train from Belfast to Dublin one day, Rains was alone in his compartment, holding a book in each hand. Tree passed by in the corridor and stopped short.
“What are you doing?”
“I'm reading, Chief.”
“Yes, I can see that. Very interesting. Two books at one time.”
“I'm reading The Newcomes, Chief, but I can't read it without the other.”
“Why not?”
“The other book's a dictionary.”
Satisfied that Willie was on his way to some sort of literary fluency, Crichton next went to work on his protégé’s speech.
“Say ‘Mon-day,’ not ‘Mundy.’ Can't you hear it, boy?”
Rains could hear it, all right. But he could not readily mimic the difference. Crichton decided that the young man had merely acquired slovenly habits of speech and taught him how to roll his r’s—or, more accurately, compelled him to do so. For weeks the backstage of His Majesty's Theatre echoed with nearly incomprehensible cries of “ever-r-r-r-rybody down for-r-r-r-r the fir-r-r-r-rst act.” Slowly, with these new inflections, Rains's voice began to change for the better. This improvement was either apparent to Tree, or he was informed of it by Crichton. In any case, one day the Chief sent for his prompter.
Rains appeared in Tree's office and stood for several minutes before the great desk, waiting for Tree's attention.
“Ah, yes, young Rains,” Tree finally boomed, looking up from some more important task. “Tell me—what are you going to do with your life?”
The question staggered Rains. One worked for a living and supported one's family. Was there anything else?
“What do you mean, Chief?” he mumbled.
“I mean, you can't go on being a prompter.”
“I always thought I'd like to be a stage manager,” Rains replied. The stage manager made five pounds a week and wore a silk hat.
Tree winced at the idea. “No, tell me what you want to be.”
“I don't know, Chief,” Rains confessed. “I just want to live nice.”
“Very interesting. Of course, you could live very nicely if you became a successful actor. Have you ever thought about being an actor?”
“I don't know, Chief,” Rains said again, increasingly dumbfounded by the whole conversation. He looked desperately down at his shoe tips, freshly conscious of his lack of height.
“You're small, aren't you? I don't think you could play heroes.”
“No, Chief.”
“How about Twelfth Night. Are you healthy? Can you belch?” He was referring to Sir Toby Belch, one of Shakespeare's best comic characters.
“What about Sir Andrew Aguecheek?”
“I think I could, Chief.”
“You've seen me play Hamlet. Do you think you could play Hamlet?”
He knew he couldn't, but Tree's tone called for an affirmative answer. “I think I could, Chief.”
“Then come to my office at one o'clock tomorrow,” said Tree. “Perhaps I can help you.”
The next day, Rains appeared at the designated hour and knocked on the door. Tree was in a sporting mood.
“Who is it?”
“It's Rains, sir.”
“Who?”
“Rains, sir.”
At last admitted, Rains found Tree being costumed for a rehearsal by his dresser, Alfred Trebell, who was trussing him into a corset. With each tug at the lacing around his substantial midriff, Tree let out a groan.
“That's all right, Guv'nor,” said Trebell, appraising the displaced girth. “Now it's your chest.”
“What do you want, Rains?” said Tree, gasping slightly.
“Chief, you told me to come to your office.”
“Why?”
“Well, Chief, we were talking about what I was going to do with my life. You told me to come to your office. You said you wanted to help me.”
“I did?” Tree retorted, his voice rising in mock incredulity. “How could I possibly help you?”
“I don't know, Chief. You said I might become an actor.”
“Ah, yes, but only if you had books and elocution lessons. But of course you would need the money to pay for them.”
Rains hung his head in embarrassed silence as Tree, wearying of the tease, reached under his desk blotter and drew out a check for thirty pounds, which he handed, smiling, to the astonished boy.
The man who was Svengali, who drew the voice of an angel from an ordinary working girl, wanted to do something similar for his young prompter.
The thought of becoming an actor had never entered Rains's mind. He was surrounded by so many giants of the profession that the idea of sharing their occupation seemed unattainable. Yet, by his generous gesture, Tree had indicated to Rains that the stage was not beyond his reach. And Crichton, still pressing him to remedy his diction, must have thought him worth the effort.
Rains bought elocution books and applied himself to the exercises with the same zeal he applied to his job. One exercise required him to press his tongue against the roof of his mouth and blow energetically. Whatever else this accomplished, it must have amused his fellow tram passengers. Singing and reading aloud minimized his stammer.
He began to notice the quality of speech flowing everywhere around him, and began to study the voices that he most admired. There was Basil Gill of the resonant timbre and the rich and splendid enunciation, and Henry Ainley, who some said would have been the greatest of them all had his self-discipline and sobriety been equal to his talent. From the physically unprepossessing Philip Merivale, one of Gladys Cooper's husbands, Rains learned that exemplary posture and a royal bearing could be a perfectly adequate substitute for height and physique. He began to pull back his shoulders and puff out his chest to the point that his back muscles became as weary as those of his tongue, and ultimately as highly developed.
It took eighteen months for Rains to rid himself of his speech impediments. As a reward, he was granted a small part, the role of a page boy named Winkles in a revival of the 1901 play The Last of the Dandies by Clyde Fitch, which opened at His Majesty's in the spring of 1904, and ran for a week. The play recounted the notorious exploits of Alfred, Count D'Orsay, the great nineteenth-century fashion plate and libertine. His speech impediments conquered, Rains finally spoke his first lines of dialogue on stage, after setting a footstool for Lady Blessington, Count D'Orsay's mistress: “LADY B: Winkles. You say Miss Power received a letter this afternoon? PAGE: Yes, me lady. LADY B: And it made her cry? PAGE: Yes, me lady. LADY B: And what did you do? PAGE: I cried too, me lady. LADY B: [Touched] Why, Winkles? PAGE: ’Cause I love Miss Power, me lady. LADY B: So do I, Winkles.” With the role of Winkles, “Willie Wains” was finally consigned to history. The young actor was billed as “Master Claude Rains.”
When Tree's assistant stage manager, a Frenchman, returned to Paris, Rains assumed his position. Despite the promotion, prompting remained integral to his duties. In addition to always having a prompter on book, Tree relied on other devices, such as having chorus members memorize his part and stand near him on stage, whispering lines as required. He also utilized chalkboards in the wings, inscribed with dialogue; Rains once incurred Tree's wrath by holding one upside down.
Rains got at least one direct glimpse of Tree's personal life during a lavish 1908 production of Faust, an adaptation of the legend by Stephen Phillips, an actor turned playwright whose poetic interpretations of the classics had led many critics to claim him as the salvation of a theatre mired in realism and decadence. Phillips had already given Tree the lyrical productions Nero and Ulysses, which had earned acclaim. Faust was Tree's direct challenge to the legacy of Henry Irving—now two years dead—who had made Mephistopheles a signature role. But Phillips's adaptation was no match for the Lyceum's, and the production had problems from the start.
One day, a technical rehearsal was about to begin and Tree was absent. Rains was dispatched by the stage manager to find him, and he searched from the basement to the Dome, but Tree was nowhere to be found. Rains was passing the royal box on his return to the stage when, from behind the drawn curtains, he heard a woman's giggle. Rains paused, then parted the curtains. There in the dim interior was Tree, mounting a bosomy conquest.
“Excuse me, Chief,” said Rains, his cheeks hot with embarrassment.
Tree shot him an outraged look. “Go away, idiot!” he snarled. “You always ruin everything.”
Tree was perhaps more amused than annoyed, for discomfiting incidents were something he enjoyed as much as he relished a good joke, which he frequently created if one did not appear. Any actor who played the Artful Dodger to Tree's Fagin in Oliver Twist might expect to find a cold kipper in his pocket instead of the stolen bauble specified in the script.
As Tree's assistant stage manager, it was Rains who began to bear the greater brunt of Tree's pranks.
Tree's rehearsals were legendarily chaotic, and onlookers were frequently amazed when the actual performances went smoothly. Tree was often preoccupied with his jokes, and his idea of humor could sometimes turn cruel. He kept J. Fisher White, a noted character actor of the time, sitting around backstage for half a day for the rehearsal of a scene Tree actually had no intention of doing. The incident introduced Rains to what he would later describe as “my first ugly word.” White slumped morosely in a chair, fanning himself with a bowler hat, and Rains passed by him several times. White, a man of soft voice and gentle manner, at last brought himself to inquire when he might expect to be called.
“They're not doing that scene today, sir,” Rains answered, and was dumbfounded by White's response. The actor emerged from his courtly tranquility like a bull departing an arena chute. He slammed his bowler atop his head, and placed his reddening face up to Rains's. With precise and elegant enunciation, White said, “I hope he dies writhing with cancer in his fucking stomach.”
Rains was shocked. It was the only time that White ever revealed a baser side. Years later, it occurred to Rains that White probably had some romantic assignation arranged that day, and that Tree perhaps was aware of it.
Faust put Tree especially on edge. His performance and production would be closely compared to Henry Irving's, and the Phillips script was badly showing its seams in rehearsal. During a scene in which Mephistopheles emerged from Hell, the stage was in darkness except for a flickering red light that flooded upward from behind a small flat painted to resemble jagged rocks that supposedly concealed a terrifying abyss. Tree, more than most actors, was prone to forget his lines; indeed, in every play he did there was at least one scene in which his memory repeatedly went blank. Everyone in the theatre was aware of it, and they grew tense as the problem scene in Faust approached: the famous scene on the Brocken, with the stage glowing red and flying witches dangling overhead on wires.
Tree managed the first line or two, then hissed to Rains, who was standing on the left side of the proscenium. “What do I say now?”
As he looked toward his prompter Tree saw a bright white light glaring off the script. “What is that damned light?” he demanded. “It's ruining the scene! Turn it off!”
Rains turned off the light.
“That's better,” said Tree. “Now, what do I say?”
“I don't know, Chief.”
“What do you mean, you don't know?”
Tree knew full well the reason, but preferred to tease the boy.
“I can't see the book,” answered Claude.
“Why not?”
“Because you told me to turn out the light.”
“Bloody idiot!” Tree snorted, grinning inwardly.
The rehearsal proceeded, with Rains turning the light on and off. Afterward Tree pulled him aside.
“I've got a marvelous idea,” he said. “Why don't you memorize that scene and you can lie on the floor behind the flat and when I need a line, I'll just tap you with my foot and then you give me the line.”
Rains hadn't memorized dialogue in four years, but he dutifully took the script home and stayed awake all night learning the scene. The next day, during the final dress rehearsal, he was so tired from lack of sleep that he was almost numb. He crawled behind the flat and lay on his back. The lights dimmed, the red glow appeared, and Mephistopheles loomed above. Tree was well into the scene before he gave Rains a tap in the ribs with his foot. Rains, of course, was half asleep, his mind emptied of the devil's rhetoric. Tree tapped him again, harder. Then another, even more severe tap. “What do I say?” the actor hissed. Silence. The taps escalated into outright kicks. Still nothing. The great actor finally lost his patience. “A bloody idiot!” Tree bellowed. “A bloody idiot who can't learn his lines!”