2

Marriages and
Mustard Gas

EMILY RAINS WAS NOT A HAPPY WOMAN while her son was growing up, though not because of any failing on his part. On the contrary, he must have been a source of pride for her. After all, in addition to overcoming his speech impediments, his responsibilities at His Majesty's Theatre had expanded impressively, from those of call boy to prompter to assistant stage manager. Rains had become an indispensable part of the production company and toured extensively, giving him considerable exposure to the world outside London. “At various times after I was fourteen years old, I visited and lived in most of the important provincial towns of England and Ireland, and I visited Berlin, Germany in pursuance of my occupation,” he later wrote.

But while he was at home he watched his mother's mental state steadily deteriorate. The concept of postpartum depression had not yet been formulated, but there is much in Rains's recollections to suggest the condition. “She'd lost a lot of children,” he noted; and her final pregnancy, with Rains's sister Maude Emily, whom the family called Bobby, “had affected a nerve.”

“I wouldn't say she was out of her mind, but there's no doubt about it, she needed treatment,” he said. He called his father “a damned fool of a husband” who delayed getting his wife medical attention. “I don't know if was on the advice of a doctor or not—I don't know how it was done, and she may have been more seriously ill than I knew. But he took her to a lunatic asylum on Epsom Downs where the famous Derby is run.”

Rains recalled his painful memory years later. “And I remember getting on the bicycle, on the weekend—I was working then—and going to see Mother. She had no business being there. She was surrounded by lunatics. She was frantic.” For reasons he didn't understand, he was required to sleep with his father during his mother's stay in the asylum. Rains also was forced to become a caretaker for his youngest sister. “I was the only one who could do anything with Bobby,” he recalled. Bobby had unrecorded health problems of her own, and didn't survive childhood.

Finally, his mother was released from the asylum. “I remember the joy of her coming back, our joy, my joy, my sister's joy. And then her mind going a bit off again. So this time she thought maybe we'd send her back to Epsom Downs, and she went off and got the Salvation Army to look after her. They did a marvelous job, and she was happy while they were doing it. They had her in some kind of a home, and they cured her all right, took care of her mind.”

Not all of Rains's adolescence was preoccupied with family illness and loss. His interest in the opposite sex became serious for the first time at the age of sixteen, when he fell in love with a young walk-on actress at His Majesty's named Elsie Rowbottom. She was only fourteen or fifteen years old and, in Rains's recollection, “an English rose.” He saved his money for a long time, then went to the Burlington Arcade in London and bought Elsie a silver bracelet. In a tailor shop on Westminster Bridge Road he spied a suit sure to impress her. He couldn't afford it, but wanted to buy it on time. His father refused to let him, giving him a piece of advice: “If you can't buy outright, don't buy at all.”

Rains didn't buy the suit, and he rigorously avoided buying on credit for the rest of his life.

Elsie eventually married Tree's wardrobe master. But the unsuccessful romance made Rains acutely aware that “I wanted a wife and I wanted children.”

He may have got one, but not the other, soon after. At the age of sixteen he made the acquaintance of a twenty-year-old seamstress named Rachel Nelson, who lived in the East End but, like Claude, worked in the West End. After a time, Rachel became pregnant, quit her job, and was forced out of her home to give birth. A fictitious paternal name was recorded on the birth certificate. According to surviving members of the Nelson family, a large “severance payment” was made to her, which they have always presumed came directly from Herbert Beerbohm Tree as an accommodation to his indispensable and indefatigable employee.

In 1910, at the age of twenty-one, Rains was assistant stage manager for Tree's acclaimed production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in which Tree played Cardinal Wolsey. The West End blockbuster ran for nearly a year. Henry VIII would mark Rains's last professional association with his mentor.

While the young man's responsibilities had substantially increased, his salary hadn't. He approached the stage manager, who referred him to the business manager, a Mr. Dana.

“What is it you want?” Dana asked.

Rains told him.

“I'll ask the Chief” was the brusque reply.

“When can I know?”

“Soon.”

The next day, Dana turned Rains down. “You're getting too big for your britches,” Dana said. A raise was a “ridiculous” demand. “Look what we've done for you. You've grown up in this theatre. We've made you an elegant man.” Rains said nothing about Rachel, the child, or anything else. He remembered crying at being refused the raise, but he wasted no time approaching other theatres. He was well known and well liked in the business. “They all knew little Rains in the West End,” he recalled. Charles La Trobe, stage manager of the Theatre Royale company based at the Haymarket, was sympathetic to his situation and agreed he should be better compensated. The theatre's director, Harley Granville-Barker, had been staging a highly successful production of Maeterlinck's fantasy The Blue Bird and was about to tour it to Australia. They needed a stage manager.

Worried about long-range security, Rains at first hesitated. But the next day he returned to the business manager's office at His Majesty's Theatre and submitted his resignation.

“Where are you going?” Dana sneered. “The workhouse?”

On hearing the news, Tree summoned Rains to his office. “What's this I hear about your going away? You can't. It's out of the question.” He then called for Dana. What was going on? “Aw, I didn't want to bother you with it, Chief. The boy's getting impossible.”

Rains agreed that the situation had indeed become impossible and made his farewell.

Before the Australian tour, his work at the Haymarket included more assistant stage managing, and here he had his first adult stage role, as a beggar named Slag in Lord Dunsany's The God of the Mountains.

Rains had also been smitten by a luminously beautiful young actress and singer named Isabel Jeans, who had made her London debut a few years earlier at His Majesty's Theatre in the musical fantasy Pinkie and the Fairies. At first he had barely noticed her, but during a Dublin tour, after a period of hard work, he was given a vacation of sorts, on the condition that he also sail to Liverpool to accept shipment of some company scenery. Riding a “jaunting car” (a kind of buggy used in Ireland) on his way out of town, Rains suddenly took notice of one of his traveling companions—Isabel. Later, in the moonlight, on the boat, he was immediately drawn to “this lovely little girl with enormous eyes.” The stop in Liverpool led to more conversation, and a courtship soon began. Rains learned that Isabel's life was unhappy and fairly lonely. Her father was a commercial traveler, roaming about London at night selling tea, coffee, and food, with a steady, prime spot at Marble Arch.

Rains quickly decided he wanted to marry Isabel. He would use the Australian tour to finance the nuptials. They gave each other pet names: “Clid” and “Izzy.” Rains arranged for Isabel to stay with a family with sons and daughters near her own age. The relationship got off to a bad start when Rains became jealous of one of the family's sons. Although there was no evidence of actual infidelity (just an overly familiar postcard), Isabel had to intercede to prevent Rains from thrashing the other young man with a cane.

For The Blue Bird, Rains was sent to Sydney a month ahead to make preliminary arrangements, supervise set construction, and hire child actors and dancers—a dozen of the latter were required for one key scene, to emerge spectacularly from the numerals of a giant clock. Expecting to receive his first paycheck upon arrival, he spent most of his money on some flashy suits, both to celebrate his prestigious new appointment and to impress the Aussies. He had not anticipated that the boat would dock in Melbourne and that he would have to make an overland train connection to Sydney, thus delaying his paycheck by several days. A room had been booked for him, but Rains could afford little more than peaches and water for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was a humiliating situation, reminiscent of his starving pickpocket days at Her Majesty's.

This time, though, there would be no thievery. According to Walter Havers, a writer for The London Magazine to whom Rains later gave a detailed biographical interview, “False pride and his appalling sensitiveness would not allow him to request an advance of salary, and steadily the craving for more solid food grew upon him. There was only one way to satisfy his hunger, a truly drastic one.” He had a ring of no small sentimental value, but he decided to pawn it. He could buy it back after receiving his pay.

“Nervously, he made his way to the nearest pawnshop, “Havers wrote, “only to pass and repass it, unable to pluck up sufficient courage to enter. Timidly he approached the window, and then in desperation, slipping the ring from his finger, turned hastily to enter the shop. Fate, however, was against him, for under the window was an iron grating, and in his excitement the ring dropped from his hands and disappeared into the murky depths beneath.” Peaches and water would have to tide him over.

The Blue Bird opened in Sydney, was a hit, and ran for six months. This was followed by a shorter but still successful engagement in Brisbane. Yet in Melbourne the same production was an inexplicable flop. The company decided to replace the offering with a production of Shaw's comedy You Never Can Tell, a play perfectly suited to the existing acting company except for one part, which management was loath to cast with an Australian because of the clash of accents.

The business manager pointed at Rains. “You.”

“But I'm not an actor.”

“You'll play the part.”

“But the character's an old man!” Rains protested. Actually, Shaw described the character as between forty and fifty. To Rains, that sounded old.

“Doesn't matter,” said the business manager. “Go out and get some striped trousers and a black jacket. Put a lot of white in your hair. You'll play it.”

“Oh, what I did to that part!” Rains remembered, laughing. The role was that of Bohun, a surprise mediator in a family dispute who appears in the final act in the most histrionic manner possible—“grotesquely majestic,” according to Rains—wearing a hooded cloak, a false nose, and goggles, which he discards in an equally theatrical manner, “rolling up the nose in the domino and throwing the bundle on the table like a champion throwing down his glove.” Rains of course could not know that Shaw would eventually become one of his stage specialties. But Shaw's own stage directions described a performance quintessentially Rains-like: “His bearing when he enters is sufficiently imposing and disquieting; but when he speaks, his powerful menacing voice, impressively articulated speech, strong inexorable manner, and a terrifying power of intensely critical listening, raise the impression produced by him to absolute tremendousness.”

When Rains returned to England, after an absence of nearly a year, he found himself once again assistant stage manager for yet another Blue Bird engagement, this time at the Queen's Theatre. The next few years in Rains's professional life would be marked by a pull between acting and stage managing, with acting eventually taking the lead.

Once back in England, Rains married Isabel, and they settled at Clifford's Inn, London. “In the same year I came to [America], visiting various cities of the East and Middle West for Granville-Barker and the Messrs. Shuberts,” Rains wrote. Isabel remained in London.

In 1913, Rains worked as assistant stage manager at the Haymarket for Ibsen's The Pretenders and Melchior Lengyel's Typhoon; in the latter play he also acted the first of several Asian roles (in which he was presumably cast because of his short stature). Moonlighting from the Haymarket, he was cast in one of his more substantial roles to date, that of Grasset, a Revolution-era French philosopher in Arthur Schnitzler's The Green Cockatoo at the Aldwych Theatre. He also stage-managed Cockatoo, along with the companion piece, Schnitzler's Comtesse Mitzi. Unfortunately, his showy performance in Cockatoo was not widely appreciated, since the play closed after only two performances. Much more successful was a guest production by Tree that Rains worked on as assistant stage manager, an adaptation of Bayard Veiller's Within the Law, which ran for over four hundred performances. Rains also performed in its one-act curtain-raiser, A Dear Little Wife, in a Japanese role.

In 1914, Granville-Barker summoned Rains, eager to have him take his company to America. “You'll act as my representative till I get there. All you have to do is watch the production, make sure that everything is all right on the stage. Clock the audience as it comes in, in order to check the box office, handle finances—ah—make speeches about Mr. Shaw and me before different clubs and organizations—I'd like you to see that the publicity is good, too, and—oh yes, I nearly forgot,” he added, “you'll play a small part.”

Isabel accompanied her husband on the scouting trip. They returned to England briefly, residing in Hampstead, and recrossed the Atlantic for the 1915 tour, which included Androcles and the Lion, Iphigenia in Taurus, and The Trojan Women. Rains appeared briefly in Androcles and as a herdsman in Iphigenia. For the latter, the New York Times opined that Rains “bounced a good deal” at the Yale Bowl performance; for the subsequent engagement at the new stadium of the College of the City of New York, before some five thousand spectators, the Times commented that “Claude Rains seems to have modified somewhat the sheer physical vigor of his performance as the herdsman, but it remains an exceedingly effective contribution to the play, so good, in fact, that many must regret that during the long season at Wallack's, he did all his work behind the scenes.”

A Titania was needed for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Granville-Barker sent for Isabel. She adored the tall, thin, brilliant, red-headed producer. “Oh, he's so pink!” Rains remembered her exclaiming.

The previous summer, Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serbian student in Sarajevo, precipitating all-out military conflict in Europe. Germany declared war on France and in September set up a nearly impregnable fortress at Vimy Ridge, overlooking the city of Arras.

Rains had received an offer of employment from the American producer Charles Frohman, but declined because of the war. “I was not heroic,” he said later. “I just knew I'd be ashamed of myself if I did not go back. I didn't want to be hurt, or hurt anyone else. And a friend over there sent word he could get me a job where I wouldn't have to do either,” he recalled, although he ultimately would not be able to avoid the battlefield.

Rains chose to join the London Scottish regiment, in part because of its theatrical uniform and its self-bestowed, bloodthirsty sobriquet “The Ladies from Hell.”

“I saw this soldier in his magnificent kilt,” Rains recalled. The regiment's kilt was fashioned from the homespun cloth known as Hodden Grey—tartans had been rejected to avoid favoring one clan over another. Besides, as the regiment's first commander, Lord Elcho, observed, “A soldier is a man hunter. As a deer stalker chooses the least visible of colors, so ought a soldier to be clad.”

“I wanted to look just like that,” Rains said. “It was the actor in me.” He often told the story of how he followed the kilted soldier on the street right into an enlistment office.

Rains trained as a marksman and proved a crack shot. He took readily and eagerly to military life; before his deployment to Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1916, he had already attained the rank of lieutenant. Rains was being sent to a place where some 150,000 French soldiers had already lost their lives; he and his fellow British troops faced the same quixotic challenge in attempting to recapture Vimy Ridge. High above the Arras plain—a vast, bleak, vulnerable expanse—the Germans were bunkered behind artillery-proof fortifications and had the clear advantage. Rains's battalion landed at La Havre; it was a hot, terrible march to the Vimy Ridge trenches, almost three days. Once there, he lay for hours by day on coconut matting amidst the mud and desolation of No Man's Land, and sat up late at night with a flashlight, bayonet, and the company of rats. In one raid on German trenches, Rains captured a German sergeant-major, who was furious. On the march back, the German was followed by a British lance corporal, Rains keeping pace alongside. For some reason, as a white flare went up, the prisoner became even more enraged, suddenly seizing Rains by the ear and shaking him. Some bayonet prodding by the lance corporal brought the German back in line.

After Rains's division's colonel was killed, he was replaced by a Scottish army man. Appalled by the appearance of his troops, he began holding parade inspections on trench duckboards and required that his men shave every day.

“My biggest fear was not war per se,” Rains recalled, “but that while sitting over the latrine, clinging to the bar, I might be shot and fall in.”

The casualties at Vimy Ridge continued to be heavy. One night, while bombs were being thrown in the dark, a lieutenant cried out, “Where's Private Whitehead?” Rains knew where he was, and went to fetch him. He found the young man in a dugout, trembling and hysterical. “Fuck it! Fuck the army! Fuck England! Fuck the King!” he shouted. Rains calmed him down, persuading him to return to the unit and not disgrace himself and the regiment.

Whitehead returned and was almost immediately killed.

In addition to machine guns, the Germans had begun to use aerosol poisons, at first chlorine and phosgene gas, and, beginning in the summer of 1917, the slower-acting, more insidious mustard gas. Rains's battlefield service was abruptly ended by both shrapnel and gas. The last thing he remembered after the shell hit him was the sound of voices saying, “Well, they got Rains.” He recalled bleeding profusely. After being hospitalized on the French coast near St. Cecile, he was invalided to Bagthorpe Military Hospital, a converted workhouse in Nottingham. His first visitor, while he was still on a stretcher, was his mother—oddly, in very good spirits. He was almost completely blinded in his right eye, and his vocal chords were paralyzed. The blindness was permanent (and would remain a carefully guarded secret for the rest of his life), but his speech gradually returned. However, he now spoke with a husky new timbre that would forever be his trademark.

In 1917, though, Rains wasn't considering future work in the theatre. After the experience of war, painting one's face for a living seemed a poor excuse for a career. Instead, he seriously contemplated a permanent military commitment. Upon his release from Bagthorpe, he transferred from the London Scottish to a battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, which remained in England for the duration of the war. At the time of his discharge, he had achieved the rank of temporary captain.

During the war, Rains's relationship with his wife suffered. Isabel continued acting both during and after the war, appearing in a West End production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1917) and the musicals Oh! Joy and The Kissing Time (both 1919), making new professional contacts and attracting new admirers. The deterioration of their marriage was made clear one night.

Isabel was playing at His Majesty's in Chu Chin Chow, a record-setting box office phenomenon that would only be eclipsed by Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap several decades later. One night Rains was entertaining a friend, John Hall, who had been wounded in the field and almost given up for dead. Celebrating his recovery, Rains took Hall to see Beatrice Lillie in the musical Cheap at the Adelphi Theatre. They drank heavily between acts, Hall so heavily that he was unable to walk. Rains had planned to dash over to His Majesty's after the show to surprise Isabel, but instead had to take his friend to Victoria Station and put him on a train to Croydon, tipping the conductor and porter to see that Hall got back to his regiment. By then it was midnight and too late to meet Isabel, so Rains decided to go home.

Just as he entered the Underground, a zeppelin raid hit. The tube was plunged into darkness. In the confusion Rains took the wrong train; he had to change at Hammersmith for the next train to Kew Gardens–Richmond. The train was dark. After a while he heard a familiar voice saying “darling” to someone. Then he saw, momentarily silhouetted by a searchlight, Isabel—in the arms of another soldier.

Rains said nothing, but followed the couple when they got off at Kew Gardens. He watched from a distance as they took a long time saying good night. “It was such an indignity,” he remembered. He decided to deliberately stride past them on the platform.

“My God, it's Clid!” Isabel exclaimed when she saw him. She broke away from the soldier and ran after her husband down the platform. “What are you going to do?” she asked him when she caught up with him.

“I'm going home.”

“Oh, Clid, it's dreadful,” she said.

“Yes, it is. I feel dirty. Who is he?”

“He's Gilley. He's the son of the Bishop of Birmingham. He's going to be a barrister.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“All the time you were in France. I was terribly lonely.”

“Do you want to marry him?”

“Yes.”

“How could you? You wrote me all those letters, sent me books, everything I needed or wanted.”

“I was lonely.”

“You'd better pack up,” Rains told his wife. “You sleep upstairs tonight. I'll sleep downstairs. You'll go off tomorrow.” Isabel protested that she still loved him. “Don't worry about me,” he told her icily. “Worry about yourself.”

Isabel would later describe the breakup in rather different terms to her friend John Gielgud, who reported, “I once asked her how she got on with Claude, and I think she said ‘He locked me in a cupboard’ or something. Anyhow, I think he was a bit brutal with her.”

Brutalized or not, three nights later Isabel returned, abject. Rains found her sitting in their living room, surrounded by luggage and boxes, and her canary in a wicker cage. “My heart was beating like hell,” he remembered.

“Clid?” she began.

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm unhappy.”

“Don't you love Gilley? Aren't you living with him?”

“I'm not happy there with him. Because I know you're so unhappy. Can't you make up your mind to be happy so I can be happy with Gilley?” She was pitiful, clearly wracked with guilt.

Rains and Isabel attempted reconciliation twice, but after she suffered a miscarriage—with Gilley presumably the father of the unborn child—Rains finally divorced her on grounds of adultery in 1918. Rains recalled the divorce as a “dreadful” process. He appeared at the Old Bailey in uniform, and Isabel admitted her infidelity. After the divorce, she married Gilley.

After the war, Rains wrote, “I was demobilized with the rank of [temporary] Captain early in 1919.” He completed paperwork for reenlistment with the Eastern Command. “I wanted to live a man's life. I wanted to be a soldier,” he said. The move would require him to drop from the rank of captain to lieutenant and take an assignment in Nigeria, but his mind was made up—or so he thought.

All that he still needed was a colonel's signature on his enlistment papers. He was walking down the street with the papers under his arm when he ran into an old theatre acquaintance.

“Why are you in uniform?” Rains's friend asked.

“I'm going to stay in uniform. I'm going into the regular army.”

His friend was incredulous. “What for?”

“I'd feel like a sissy if I went back to the theatre.”

Rains's friend gave him a sly look. “Come have lunch,” he said. He took Rains to the Green Room Club, where Rains had been a member before the war. At the club they encountered directors Stanley Bell and Gilbert Miller, as well as celebrated classical actor Henry Ainley, whom Rains greatly admired.

By the end of the lunch, Rains had accepted a contract as stage manager at St. James's Theatre, where he would also act. His first acting assignment after the war was in Douglas Murray's comedy Uncle Ned, star-ring Ainley, on tour in Sheffield in the spring of 1919, followed by the role of Ivan Petrovitch in Reparation, based on Tolstoy's The Live Corpse. Reparation was staged at St. James's Theatre, and Rains once more found himself acting with Ainley under the direction of Stanley Bell. Rains lived with Ainley and his wife for a time in St. Regent's Park, and the older actor would forever address the younger man not by his given name, but as “Lodger.” Rains combined stage-managing with acting in Julius Caesar at St. James's in January 1920, first playing the role of Casca and later, on tour, Cassius to Ainley's Marcus Antonius. In April, Rains was loaned out to the Duke of York's Theatre for the lead role in Gogol's comedy The Government Inspector.

In addition to his stage work, Henry Ainley had been active in motion pictures since 1914, and it was evidently on his professional coattails that Rains was cast in Ainley's film Build Thy House, directed by Fred Goodwins and released by the Ideal Film Company in October 1920. Ainley played a demobilized officer, Arthur Burnaby, who returns to England to take over his deceased father's business interests. Rains played Clarkis, formerly Burnaby's batman, or soldier-servant, now a drunken and jobless casualty of war, who recognizes that this “Burnaby” is an im-poster. But instead of developing into a standard crime melodrama, the story takes a sharp turn into a somewhat preachy tract for labor reform. No print of the film, nor any still photographs from the production, are known to have survived. Rains would not appear in another motion picture for thirteen years.

Rains's respect for Ainley was sorely tested during the Wimbledon tryout of Sem Benelli's The Jest in the fall of 1920. Benelli set his play in Florence during the fifteenth-century reign of Lorenzo de Medici, but constructed the rip-roaring melodrama in the style of a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Stanley Bell cast Rains in the showy part of Giannetto, a sensitive young painter brutalized by a pair of thuggish brothers, Neri and Gabriello, upon whom he takes a delicious revenge. Ainley played Neri. The roles had been essayed the previous season in New York by John and Lionel Barrymore, and the show was a proven hit. The thirty-year-old Rains was not exactly the ideal choice for the part of a fey youth of seventeen (the role had already been offered to Basil Rathbone and Godfrey Tearle, who were unavailable), but he was a better choice for his part than was Ainley, who had “begun to fill out a bit,” recalled Rains, owing largely to an increasing fondness for gin. Though strikingly handsome, the older actor's career had clearly begun to decline, while Rains's was on a rapid ascent. The producers considered ways to adapt the role for Rains. Perhaps instead of being effeminate he could be a hunchback? Because the character already had a servant-dwarf of his own, this idea did not play well. In the end, Rains played the part like a demonic kewpie doll. Rains recalled that his costume and makeup drew the special attention of gay theatre patrons, one of whom was overheard in the lobby: “Did you see Rains? White face, red hair, black tights—and no jockstrap!”

Over four acts, Giannetto sets a series of traps for Neri, who, in his drunken oafishness, steps into each one. The coup de grâce is Neri's fatal stabbing of his own brother, believing him to be Giannetto. Then, in the third act, Giannetto confronts his nemesis, shackled and near-mad in a dark jail cell. “I had the most marvelous speech to bring down the curtain, a speech with a lot of venom in it,” Rains recalled. The scene was illuminated by a single lantern, the light of which intensified along with Giannetto's swelling monologue, dramatically illuminating Rains from below. “I was getting good notices,” he remembered.

Ainley's performance, however, was called “a little too vigorous, too much of a Viking. He bellowed and shouted and stamped.” The actor apparently began taking all the humiliation and abuse heaped upon his character personally and grew jealous of his show-stopping protégé. “Harry was disgruntled about the whole goddamned thing,” recalled Rains. It was his own fault, he shouldn't have played the part. He couldn't play Giannetto, he'd grown too big.” One night Ainley distracted and up-staged Rains by changing some dialogue in the first act. Then he began to press Rains to eliminate what he called the “ridiculous, comic” device of the lantern in Rains's big scene. As an experienced stage manager, Rains knew it was verboten to change the staging of a production once on tour. Besides, where would light come from in a dark jail cell except from the lantern? Perhaps from pale moonlight through a grate, Ainley suggested. Rains refused.

The next night Ainley took things into his own hands—or feet. He contrived a new entrance that allowed him to stumble over the thing that was giving Rains so much attention. “He kicked out the lamp, smashed it,” Rains recalled. Management, alerted in London by phone, finally intervened; the lantern was restored. From then on, said Rains, “it was bloody murder to be in the theatre with him, let alone play a part with him.” Yet, he added, “I was sorry for the man. I saw what was happening to him. And I did like him. I tried to help him in so many ways.” For instance, Rains would help Ainley into the bathroom when he came home drunk, not an uncommon occurrence. And he managed to convince the older man to bathe instead of just dousing himself with cologne. Ainley's American wife, whom Rains remembered as “a damned good-looking woman,” felt the younger actor was a stabilizing influence on her husband.

The London engagement of The Jest was ultimately canceled, but in the wake of advance publicity, another management quickly mounted its own production, now called The Love Thief, with the waspish character actor Ernest Thesiger as Giannetto. John Gielgud judged that production “a great failure.”

Rains never worked with Ainley again. Not long after, Gilbert Miller bought out Ainley's interest in St. James's Theatre.

During this period, Rains's mother had to be committed to a nursing home. “Her mind went,” he said. “I don't know how else to describe it. She was lucid just half the time, and needed proper care.” Rains and his sister found the home, and Rains paid all the expenses. “She grew to be very happy when her mind was nice and clear, but when it wasn't she was unhappy. She got to know the birds, I remember. She'd talk about them when I went there, point them out, the different birds she'd learned about. She was very loving to me.”

One day backstage at St. James's, the phone rang, the caller refusing to identify herself until Rains took the call. It was Isabel. She told Rains she was in some kind of difficulty and convinced him to meet her at a little restaurant on German Street near Piccadilly Circus. There, over dinner, Rains found his former wife “very gay” and well turned out, wearing one of her “wonderful wigs.” (Her natural hair, Rains recalled, was very thin.) She didn't even mention the nature of her “trouble” until the check arrived.

“What is it you want, Izzy?” he finally asked.

“I want you, Clid.”

Her strategy didn't work. Rains had already made the acquaintance of another actress, Marie Hemingway, while touring with Julius Caesar and The Jest. “She was so beautiful,” said Rains, “and because she was so beautiful I thought she must be innocent. I was lonely, we were on tour, the days and the nights after the theatre were empty, and what with one thing after another, I found myself saying, ‘Well, I'll marry you if you want me to’ or something like that.”

Rains admitted that he knew very little about Marie. Nevertheless, he said, “We were married quietly and went down to Cornwall, to her parents’ house. Up on the cliffs and the water below. Everything very nice. Had dinner. Went to bed. She excused herself to say good night to mommy and daddy and returned an hour later terribly drunk. Lusty. I wanted nothing to do with her. She said, ‘If you won't, I'll throw myself out the window.’ I remember her opening the window and standing up on the sill. God, what a first night!”

Things only got worse when they returned to London, to their second- floor flat in Duke Street, St. James. “I finally realized she was an alcoholic. She would hide liquor everywhere, even on top of the old high toilet. Bottles of Three-Star Hennessey.” Marie was then playing the lead opposite Sir John Martin Harvey in The Only Way. “Somehow she managed to get through rehearsals. Several times she was too drunk to make the theatre and I had to telephone and say she was sick.”

Having already had one marriage end disastrously, Rains was not eager for another marital catastrophe. “I tried to make the best of it. I couldn't stand another failure. I hate failure. I tried to live with it.”

Rains sought the advice of Marie's family physician, Dr. Lidyard Wilson (who would remain “a marvelous friend” almost to the end of Rains's life). Wilson was blunt. “You've got to get out of this,” he said. “I warn you, she will destroy you.”

Following the doctor's advice, Rains moved out of the Duke Street flat and into a nearby hotel “where they brought you a brass hip bath and tins of hot and cold water in the morning.” He found himself spending much of his time at the Primrose Club in St. James Street, which had made him an honorary member.

But he still stewed over Marie. And he knew she was spending time with another man.

Late one night he got up, got dressed, and resolved to break into the Duke Street flat to confront his treacherous wife and her lover. He even put on tennis shoes for stealth, planning to climb in silently through the bathroom window. But as he passed through the hallway outside the flat, he heard a man's voice inside and lost all composure. “I banged on the door,” he said. “Lost my head. I heard the lady phone for the police.” He ran across the street and hid in a doorway. He watched the police arrive, go up to the flat, then come back down and leave.

The flat beneath his and Marie's was occupied by Betty Chester, a well-known comedienne. Just as Rains was catching his breath, Betty came down the street. Accompanying her was a friend of his: Noel Coward, then a struggling young playwright, actor, and songwriter who, like Rains, had served in the war. Coward spied Rains in the doorway.

“What's the matter, Claude?” he asked. Rains explained the situation. Betty went inside her building, and Rains and Coward took a walk across St. James's Park. Coward was on his way to his mother's house on the other side of the park, and the late-night stroll allowed for some private conversation.

“I can't bear another failure,” Rains told Coward. “I already had one—and now this.”

“But everybody knows about her,” replied Coward. “She's beautiful and she's very vain, Claude. Do you want to go on with it? You'll only have trouble.”

“I can't bear failure,” Rains repeated.

By then the two had arrived at the opposite side of the park, by the Queen Victoria monument across from Buckingham Palace. They sat on the coping before the lights and spraying water. “There's only one thing to do,” Coward said. “You'll have to go to her and tell her it's your fault—that you're the difficult one to live with.”

Rains pondered this. “But I can't go see her,” he said at last.

“Well, then, write her.”

It was perfectly logical counsel from one who had such a way with words; but Rains, a nonwriter, wasn't up to the task. His attempts at composing a letter to Marie failed, and he appealed to his friend Coward, who, in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac, dictated a letter for him. “A wonderful thing for him to do,” Rains later said.

But high-powered literary ghostwriting got Rains nowhere with Marie. Dr. Wilson told him that Marie was saying “all kinds of things” about him, even accusing her husband of homosexuality, perhaps because of his friendship—which was completely platonic—with Coward. Pushing his idea for a divorce, Wilson presented Rains with a game plan. If Wilson could persuade the volatile Marie to “behave” in court, could Rains contrive some evidence giving her grounds for divorce? Rains, recoiling at the idea of parading his wife's alcoholism in public, consented to a ruse. Once again, Noel Coward helped him concoct a scheme.

Rains remembered, “I went to a little hotel in Soho with a very gracious lady who had been a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which had been founded by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. ‘I'll help you out,’ she said. I got a bottle of whiskey and a little bag, and we registered as man and wife. She got into bed. I got into an armchair and got drunk.” The next morning, he got up, rang for room service, and hopped into bed with the “gracious lady.” When the maid arrived, Rains said, “I want breakfast for Mrs. Rains and myself.”

Rains handed over this “evidence” of adultery to Dr. Wilson, who nonetheless was unable to make Marie cooperate. As the divorce proceedings began, the physician rang him up. “What's this about cruelty?” he asked. Rains didn't know what his friend was talking about. Wilson suggested he get a newspaper. When Rains did, he saw the lurid headline: “Cruelty of Actor Husband.”

Marie was granted a divorce, but at a considerable cost to Rains's reputation—or at least to his pride. He felt himself to be ostracized, even professionally suspect. “I was a womanizer, a dirty dog, and nobody would have anything to do with me,” he remembered. “No decent theatre would hire me.” Rains's feelings may have gotten the better of his memory here, however: in fact he had no fewer stage roles in 1921, the year after his marriage and divorce, than he did in 1920.

In January 1921 Rains took the title role in Daniel, a work by French playwrights Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, who was the grandson-inlaw of Sarah Bernhardt and who had tailored the play specifically for the aging Bernhardt's physical limitations. At the age of seventy-six, with one of her legs recently amputated, Bernhardt played the title role of a wheelchair-bound morphine addict, covered in stump-concealing rugs, embroiled in a melodramatic love triangle. French audiences suspended multiple layers of disbelief, accepting Bernhardt in the part of a young man nearly fifty years younger than she actually was. When Rains played the role in London, reviewers were less quick to swallow the wheelchairand-rugs gambit, which contributed nothing to the plot. Nonetheless, Rains himself received plaudits. The Times called his performance “a haunting thing,” the character of Daniel “an utter wreck, but a picturesque, romantic wreck, a choice curio shattered, the irretrievable ruin of something comely and precious.”

Next was the role of “The Stranger” in George Middleton and Guy Bolton's Polly with a Past with Noel Coward and Edith Evans, produced, like Daniel, at St. James's Theatre. Then came the part of Laurent, the Marquis de Mortain, in Legion of Honor at the Aldwych Theatre in August, followed by the Clemence Dane play Will Shakespeare, in which Rains played doomed playwright Christopher Marlowe, rendered with a considerable dollop of poetic license by Dane. Shakespeare was played by Philip Merivale, and Ann Hathaway by Moyna Macgill (the future mother of Angela Lansbury); Flora Robson was also in the cast, as Queen Margaret.

The year 1922 provided Rains with only two acting credits: the role of a creepy Japanese butler in Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's long-running melodrama The Bat in January and in the expressionist/experimental play The Rumour by C. K. Munro in December. The following year, to supplement his acting income, Rains accepted a teaching position at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which had been founded by his mentor, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, in 1904. When Rains began his association with RADA, it was based in a pair of old houses in London's Gower Street. The school's curriculum was heavily weighted with the disciplines inherited from the era of Tree and Irving—gesture, elocution, fencing, and movement. The more deeply psychological influence of Stanislavski was barely noted by the British theatre establishment. (The Moscow Art Theatre would not appear in London until 1928.) The British theatre had no government subsidies at the time. Because of this, it was a market-driven industry and therefore embraced techniques that were proven commercially. Rains would never have a formal introduction to Stanislavski's “method,” though he would later express considerable appreciation for the technique. In fact, he clearly took a similar approach to building his characters, instinctively grounding them in solid psychological motivation.

Cedric Hardwicke, who had been a RADA student a few years before Rains taught there, recalled that “the principal method of tuition was for each class to rehearse some three or four plays, which were eventually produced at the end of the term. It was a good system for the students, and as the girls at the Academy far outnumbered the boys, I gained experience in a wide variety of parts. But it seemed tough luck on the parents and friends whose duty it was to attend the performances!”

Rains was immediately struck, and forever frustrated, by the unevenness of talent, much less professional aspiration, he perceived in many of his female students. “These young students, what were they there for? Fun, having larks, some of them. They put up some kind of good test or they wouldn't have gotten in, but when they were in, it was obvious they weren't filled with the fire or ambition to become real actresses. They'd laugh. I used to get livid.”

Like most acting teachers, Rains found that some of his students “were more temperamental than others, some were more adept than others, but nearly all of them had speech difficulties of one kind or another. So at some point during their studies, they could be sure of one particular assignment. It was a tongue-twister, a series of verbal acrobatics from a book of nonsense titles, Grimm Tales Made Gay.” He recalled an example, suggested by the legend of Bluebeard:

A maiden from the Bosporus
With eyes as bright as phosphorus
Once wed the wealthy bailiff
Of the Cailiff of Kilatt.
Though diligent and zealous, he
Became a slave to jealousy.
Considering her beauty,
’Twas his duty to do that.

Rains's teaching colleagues included Alice Gachet, who specialized in French drama, and Elsie Chester, a formidable instructor who had lost a leg in a traffic accident and was thereafter reputed to fling her crutch at students who sufficiently displeased her.

Fortunately, Rains had a number of students who didn't displease him at all. One who later expressed special admiration for Rains was John Gielgud. In a 1996 interview, Gielgud recalled, “I'd had one professional job before I met [Rains], in a provincial tour of a West End play with my cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry, and during that tour an actor in the cast said to me, ‘I don't think you're much good, you ought to have another year's training.’” So Gielgud applied to RADA and received a scholarship. “Rains was my principal and most inspiring teacher. He was very attractive, rather stocky, brown hair sort of combed over one eye. Very smart double-breasted dark suits and large knotted ties, and beautiful linen cuffs and so on.”

Gielgud thoroughly enjoyed his association with Rains. “He was very agreeable and enthusiastic and not at all bullying. And I became extremely attached to him because he seemed to give me a lot of chances. One of the first things he did with me was a scene from Shakespeare's Henry IV. I did it under his direction at a prize-giving session and won the prize.”

Rains next gave Gielgud the lead role in a student production of Tolstoy's The Live Corpse, the same part Rains himself had played earlier in the West End in the translated version, Reparation. “It was a very fine part and I was thrilled to be asked to try it. And we all worked very hard at the rehearsals and borrowed all the props from our homes, and it went very well.”

Gielgud avidly followed his teacher's stage work. “I saw him in a number of plays, including The Doctor's Dilemma at the Everyman Theatre, in which he was wonderful. I was very envious because in the last act—the fourth act, I think it is—he comes on dying in a wheelchair, and Claude was there in this beautiful dressing gown, with white hands over the edge of the chair, dying, and I thought, this was marvelous.”

“I worked as hard as I could and imitated Rains's acting until I became extremely mannered,” Gielgud wrote. “I strained every fibre in my efforts to appear violent and emotional and only succeeded in straining my voice and striking strange attitudes with my body.” Gielgud, of course, would eventually develop his own inimitable style, but in the interim, Rains “was rather interested in my work and was willing to help me all he could.” Gielgud had seen Rains's performance in Daniel, and was asked to play the part himself in what he described as a “terrible” 1924 screen adaptation called Who Is the Man?

Rains, said Gielgud, “had a twinkling eye and a very good sense of humor. He didn't take himself too seriously, which I think is such a frightfully good thing for an actor. Claude didn't give one the impression of being madly self-centered, even, but he was obviously very hard working and practical, and gathered strength from the people around him.” Gielgud thought that Rains “perhaps learned more about his own acting through teaching.”

Also among Rains's students was a lumpish young man from Brighton named Charles Laughton. He had come from a family of hoteliers, but had developed a rich imaginative life and a passion for the stage. According to Gielgud, “He had been helping his mother run a small hotel near Scarborough on the east coast and doing amateur theatricals, and [it was] very fortunate for him because nearby lived three people interested in all the arts—the Sitwells, Dame Edith, Osbert, and Sir Gerald. They must have seen his genius.”

Laughton's teachers were all struck by the obvious disparity between physique and talent. “When he came to the Academy, he was ten years younger than I and looked ten years older,” Rains recalled. Nonetheless Rains, like the Sitwells, recognized talent when he saw it. “There was nothing I could do for him,” Rains said. “He was [already] a gifted actor. All I could tell him were the technicalities of the theatre.”

“Sir,” Laughton once asked Rains, “do you think I could play a romantic part?”

His teacher was direct in his reply: “Well, you could play it, but you wouldn't look like it.” Rains felt Laughton was destined for a career in comedy, a mistake in judgment he would later fully acknowledge.

During this time, Rains was living in rooms he rented from a Mrs. Forscutt, who was the mother-in-law of actor O. B. Clarence. She only let rooms to theatre people. Rains recalled, “She did the cooking, and it was a lovely place to live.” While under her roof he appeared in The Love Habit by Louis Verneuil and Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma.

Next, Rains had the first of two acting engagements with Nigel Play-fair, the renowned actor-manager who ran the Lyric Theatre, Hammer-smith, and produced throughout the West End. A dozen years earlier, he had assistant stage-managed The Younger Generation, starring Playfair, at the Duke of York's Theatre. A few years earlier, Playfair had already translated (with Paul Selver) and produced Karl apek's R.U.R., the allegorical fantasy that introduced the word “robot” in its modern sense (in Czech, the word is the rough equivalent of “serf labor”). apek and his brother Josef had written another fable, even more politically caustic, which Playfair and Clifford Bax freely adapted from an English translation by Selver. In all the translating and adapting, much of the satirical sting of the original was lost, or deliberately jettisoned, but The Insect Play (And So Ad Infinitum) was presented at the Regent Theatre for forty-two performances in May and June of 1923. An anonymous London reviewer described the play as “a succession of parables from insect life—in turn of butterflies, beetles, ants, and may-flies, each representing a different phase of human experience.”

Rains played three roles. In the first, dealing with the butterflies, he played The Lepidopterist. The London reviewer wrote that the butterflies “are presented as modern frivollers—some in evening dress, some in fancy costume, but all with butterfly wings, squeaky voices, and trembling hands. They have nothing to do but love-making and chase each other in couples flirting and fox-trotting, and spouting little verses round a sort of fairy cocktail bar. Rather a limited view, both of butterflies and humans, and not by any means the best thing in the play.”

The Insect Play marked the professional debut of John Gielgud, who played a butterfly named Felix. “I played a small part in the first act,” Gielgud recalled in 1996, “and I think I understudied Rains, who played three parts in different parts of the play and was wonderful in all of them. Anyhow, my scenes were rather a failure and I was very much aware that I didn't know how to act at all and he used to give me hints.”

The second act dealt with beetles, presented as vulgar, middle-aged Cockneys pushing their giant ball of dung, which they alternately call their “capital” and “little pile.” A cricket couple (Mrs. Cricket was played by Angela Baddeley) is stabbed by an ichneumon fly, which feeds their body fluids to its larva (played by Elsa Lanchester as “a huge, sluggish, and also Cockney child”). The larva is devoured in turn by a Parasite, played by Rains. The feasting took place discreetly off stage. Rains returned to reveal the Parasite, hiccupping, “with Elsa inside me,” in a rolling, padded get-up he described as resembling the rotund character that advertised Michelin tires. In the third act, Rains played the Chief Engineer, the single-minded supervisor of an assembly line of warrior ants.

During the run of The Insect Play, Rains met James Whale, a director, actor, and set designer who had honed his stage skills producing amateur theatricals while interned in a German P.O.W. camp. Whale was enamored—at least platonically—with Doris Zinkeisen, the production's costume designer. Rains considered Zinkeisen “a stunning woman” and remembered her many paintings that adorned the walls of Whale's flat as “trophies of unrequited love.” Later, as a Hollywood director, Whale would have a major impact on Rains's career when he cast him in The Invisible Man. He would use Zinkeisen as his costume designer for the 1936 film version of Show Boat.

Rains played the role of the poet David Peel in John Drinkwater's Robert E. Lee (which, despite the title, was not a biographical drama but rather a study of four Virginians during the Civil War). John Gielgud understudied him and played a few performances. Rains's final acting assignment of 1923 was in Seymour Hicks and Ian Hay's Good Luck at the Drury Lane.

In 1924 Rains joined the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead for a series of productions that would showcase him in a series of roles, primarily Shavian. The first was Napoleon in Man of Destiny, pairing him opposite Jeanne de Casalis in a role suffused with Shaw's trademark battle-of-the-sexes badinage. Next came Shaw's “discussion play” Getting Married. A reviewer noted that he was a “first rate” actor of “very considerable possibilities. Unfortunately, the heat-wave caused him to stream with perspiration, although he was supposed to be cool as a cucumber.” Rains took a break from Shaw with the role of an Irish dock thief who kills his brother in Ernest George's Low Tide, but was soon in Shavian form for The Devil's Disciple. “Mr. Claude Rains as Dick Dudgeon adds one more to the very striking series of parts which he has played on this particular stage recently,” wrote a reviewer. “Considering how good Mr. Rains used to be (and doubtless still is) at the degenerate type of character, he makes a very satisfactory strong man—and, owing to his quick intelligence, a more than satisfactory Shavian strong man.” A stage mishap during the run generated some press attention (if it wasn't generated for just that purpose):

STAGE EXECUTION ALMOST BECAME REAL
WHEN HE LOST HIS BALANCE

While acting as the condemned man in the execution scene in Bernard Shaw's “The Devil's Disciple,” at the Everyman Theatre, Mr. Claude Rains had a narrow escape from being hanged.

“The steps leading to the scaffold rest on a little trolley,” said Mr. Rains in an interview yesterday, “so that when I am about to die the executioner pushes the trolley and the steps from under me.

“Just as the executioner had placed the rope round my neck I lost my balance. The steps and trolley beneath me began to move, and if the executioner had not noticed it and acted quickly, I am sure my sins would have found me out.”

 

Another paper quipped that “Hanging your leading actor sounds like a drop scene,” a groaning pun on the term for painted background scenery hoisted and lowered on ropes.

Rains traded in the noose for an aviator's scarf and goggles for Shaw's Misalliance, perhaps a bit too engagingly for the playwright, who sent him a rather cryptic critique by telegram: MY DEAR MR. RAINS. MUST YOU BE SO VERY C-H-A-R-M-I-N-G AS JOEY PERCIVAL CIVAL? For Every-man's final Shavian outgoing, The Philanderer, a comedy about a man dealing with two assertive New Women of the century's turn, a reviewer noted that “it is to Mr. Rains's credit that, while both Miss [Cecily] Byrne and Miss Dorothy Massingham have a material advantage over him in terms of inches, he contrived yesterday to fully hold his own.” It was not the first, and hardly the last time the subject of his height would work its way into critical appraisals.

In the midst of Rains's Everyman period, he was approached by his student Charles Laughton. “I was leaving, to get married or something, and Laughton said to me, ‘Sir, I'm looking for some rooms. Do you think you could introduce me to Mrs. Forscutt?’” Laughton was wearing a blue suit, shiny with wear, and had little money. However, on Rains's recommendation, Mrs. Forscutt took him in.

Rains was indeed leaving to be married. He had grown used to the attentions of his female students at RADA, but the one especially mad about the boy was Beatrix Thomson, who had been awarded the Academy's silver medal for acting, and with whom Rains had acted, appropriately enough, in Getting Married. He described her as an “elfin, charming, tiny thing,” and a good actress. She was also rich. Her family lived in a mansion at Effingham, Surrey, the walls hung with Goyas and the work of other masters. Beatrix's father was a close friend of the legendary English art dealer Joseph Duveen and shared his tastes.

Rains was a bit surprised when Beatrix approached him privately one day. “She wanted to take me home for a weekend. She thought I had a glamorous life.” They drove down to Effingham one night after a performance to meet her family. “I don't know if they ever really accepted me,” Rains said. But he had his own clear opinion about Beatrix's brother Gordon. “Terrible snob, the brother. Never did any work, just went to the Devonshire Club and rowed in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race.” His oars and cups were prominently displayed in the house.

The first night of the visit, Rains was still wearing stage makeup, and it rubbed off on his collar. He slept in a guest room, awakening to find the butler standing at the foot of the bed, holding the shirt and “gazing scornfully and with utter distaste” at the unsightly evidence of a life in the theatre.

Despite Rains's apparent discomfort with her family (and theirs with him), in November 1924 Rains and Beatrix Thomson were married. The pair took up residence in a pleasant basement flat with tiled fireplaces in Camden Grove, just beyond Kensington.

Rains's final repertory assignment with the Everyman company was in Home Affairs, Norman MacDermott's translation of a Hungarian comedy by Ladislas Fodor, which was produced in January 1925. According to MacDermott,

The notices were almost the best that any Everyman production had; several critics prophesised that it would be transferred quickly to the West End. Enquiries for transfer started within days. Three different theatres were on offer. But each Management wanted to change the player of the leading part from Claude Rains to some matinee idol. When I refused and asked for an explanation, they said 75 percent of all audiences were women; Rains was “too short and stocky” and women would not see a lover in him! To us, who knew Rains only had to lift that wicked quizzing eyebrow for every woman present to give an ecstatic sigh, this was at first a joke; then infuriating stupidity.

MacDermott finally turned down “two firm offers in which the change was made a condition,” and the play closed.

London audiences next enjoyed Rains in a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Restoration comedy The Rivals at the Lyric Theatre. The casting proved a bit awkward, in that both his former and current wives appeared in the production—Isabel Jeans, Marie Hemingway, and Beatrix Thomson. Whatever discomfort Rains may have experienced did nothing to deter him from giving a bravura performance as Faulkland, usually considered a thankless part that breaks the comic tone, and one often cut in performance.

Rains next took the supporting part of a dapper gambler in Godfrey Tearle's short-lived production of Salomy Jane, nominally based on the Bret Harte story “Salomy Jane's Kiss.” But between the play's preliminary announcements and opening night, Harte's name “was omitted from the programme—and wisely, for except in superficial things and the California miner in the ’sixties atmosphere, there was little to suggest that fine writer,” wrote one reviewer. “Only one incident did I recognise—the kissing by a pretty girl of a friendless man about to be hanged.” Rains was spared any critical lynching; one review called his performance “a brilliant little sketch.”

Rains had long been shrewdly adept at garnering the best notices in inferior plays and productions, but none of his skills could much help The Man from Hong Kong, a melodramatic potboiler by Mrs. Clifford Mills that opened at the Queen's Theatre in August 1925. The story concerned a cocaine smuggler of half-English, half-Chinese heritage named Li-Tong (Rains), who worked out of a “vile little restaurant in Hong Kong” but in England affected the persona of a wealthy Briton living on a houseboat in the Thames. Li-Tong is betrothed to an English maiden, whom he then proceeds to abuse in the best Saturday-matinee tradition. According to one reviewer, “In the third act we witness the Chinese ruffian continuing his evil work upon his fair-haired captive, kissing her, flinging her about, and generally reducing her to the very imbecility of terror.”

“Mr. Rains, as the Chinese villain, scowled and deepened his voice and did everything he could think of to suggest the sinister and evil,” opined the same reviewer. Another praised him for performing “with much cleverness in the first two acts. In the third the absurdity of the role proved too much for him, and he had to suffer the good-natured mockery which the ending evoked.”

Rains wasn't so sure that the derision was good-natured. “The gallery rose with one accord and said ‘Boo,’” he confided to a reporter.

Luigi Pirandello's And That's the Truth (If You Think It Is) (the title now usually translated as Right You Are If You Think You Are), an expressionist parable about illusion and reality, provided a fine acting platform for Rains, Nigel Playfair, and Nancy Price, and garnered better notices at the Lyric Hammersmith than the original Italian production, previously seen in London. Rains played a provincial Italian official whose separate living arrangements with his mother-in-law and wife become the target of gossipy speculation. Pirandello never explains the puzzle, which only adds to the droll philosophical humor. “There is some brilliant acting in this play by Claude Rains, who is probably the most dynamic and eruptive player now before the public,” wrote one critic. “I know of no player more charged with electricity. The one danger is that he may sometimes make the sparks fly at the wrong moment. If anybody seems to be bursting to act, that man is Mr. Rains.”

In Granville-Barker's talkative drama The Madras House at the Ambassadors Theatre in November, Rains shone in the role of an American millionaire named Eustace Perrin State. Rains next appeared, in May 1926, in a new translation of Gogol's The Government Inspector at the Gaiety Theatre, reprising the lead role he had played in 1921. The production, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, a major talent from Russia, was presented as a fantastic farce rather than as a straight comedy, and was radically stylized. Conventional sets were replaced by a revolving platform with movable windows and doors without walls, and the actors were made up to resemble puppets or toy soldiers. Rains felt he was being slighted by Komisarjevsky in favor of a Russian protégé in the cast, to whom he only spoke in Russian. Rains's costumes during dress rehearsals were uncomfortably ill-fitting, and he wasn't completely sure that it was not by design, just to throw him off.

The actor with whom he shared a dressing room was sympathetic and made a suggestion before the first preview, a matinee. He produced a bottle of scotch. “Why not have a good one?”

Rains was not accustomed to drinking during the day, much less before a performance. But he was sufficiently upset on that particular day to consent to a “good one.” As a result, his first, inhibition-relaxed scene, opposite the Russian protégé, was a resounding success. The Russian actor, feeling upstaged, chose to exit the scene with Rains, in essence claiming half the applause. “It was the only thing he could do,” said Rains. But his fondness for scotch would increase over the years, with serious consequences.

New in the cast of The Government Inspector was Charles Laughton, marking the first time teacher and student acted together professionally. Rains recalled, “I was afraid, when we played together, that he would act me out of the theatre. He was so damned good. He had that extraordinary face you could do so much with.” The play had a brief tryout on the London outskirts, to which Rains personally chauffeured his still financially- struggling former pupil, insisting that Laughton bargain hard for a weekly salary of no less than five pounds.

Laughton was still living at Mrs. Forscutt's, but would soon strain his landlady's hospitality to the breaking point. One night Rains dropped by to see her and found that Laughton was no longer living there.

“Where's he gone?” he asked the landlady.

“I'd rather not say” was her cryptic reply. “He was not alone when I brought him tea in the morning. So I thought he'd better go.”

Rains assumed that Laughton had been sneaking his well-known, however improbable girlfriend, Elsa Lanchester, into his rooms at night. But Lanchester, in her autobiography, recalled that Laughton's landlady (whom she misremembered as “Mrs. Foster”) was “very attached to her ‘lodger’” and that it was impossible for her and Laughton to meet in Laughton's rooms. It was, perhaps, significant that Mrs. Forscutt never told Rains the exact identity of the other party in Laughton's room. Soon after, under another roof, Laughton and Lanchester would be forced into painful private negotiations over acceptable outlets for his closeted homosexuality. In any event, the doting Mrs. Forscutt clearly felt betrayed or jilted—if not in one way, then in some other.

West End propriety was hardly limited to the sexual sphere. Drama-turgical conventions were also stringent, and productions that strayed too far from established notions of the “well-made play” did so at their peril. Just as Stanislavski was resisted, so too were the substantial contributions of German expressionist drama, which had been flourishing in Berlin for more than a decade under the nurturance of producer Max Reinhardt and playwrights like Georg Kaiser, whose From Morn to Midnight (written in 1912 and first produced in 1916) finally came to London in 1926 in an English translation by Ashley Dukes.

Expressionist theatre was an aggressive repudiation of realism, and used symbol and stylization to project psychological realities outward. From Morn to Midnight is now generally regarded as an expressionist classic, though many of its first audiences outside Germany were more than a bit perplexed by what they beheld. Rains played the Cashier, a character whose impulsive theft of 60,000 marks in the opening scene (a fascinating prefiguration of Alfred Hitchcock's similarly audience-disorienting Psycho, especially given that film's expressionist visual energy) detonates a dizzying, day-long exploration of reality and artifice, culminating in the character's public suicide. Despite a significant supporting cast, the play amounted to a one-man performance by Rains, who had to memorize some of the longest sustained speeches in the modern theatrical canon. In the end, he appears in a public hall, stripped of all illusions, scattering the stolen money to a grasping mob.

I've been all day on the road. I confess; I'm a bank cashier. I embezzled the money that was entrusted me. A good round sum; sixty thousand marks! I fled with it into your city of asphalt. By this time they're on my track; perhaps they've offered a big reward. I'm not in hiding any more. I confess! You can buy nothing worth having, even with all the money of all the banks in the world. You get less than you pay, every time. The more you spend, the less the goods are worth. The money corrupts them: the money veils the truth. Money's the meanest of the paltry swindles in this world! (He takes a gun from his pocket.) Why did I hesitate? Why take the road? Whither am I bound? From first to last you sit there, naked bone. From morn to midnight, I rage in a circle…and now your beckoning finger points the way…whither? (He shoots the answer into his breast)

The Times in particular was not impressed. “We obstinately decline to see more in this play with a vulgar story with a vulgar moral,” the anonymous reviewer wrote, rejecting the idea that there was any spiritual dimension in larceny.

In Rains's next play, Before Men's Eyes by Ben Fleet and Clifford Pember, he played a drug-addicted surgeon who redeems himself by performing delicate surgery on his wife during a raging thunderstorm. The Times described his work in glowing terms: “His touch is light and sure; he has an infectious vitality; he speaks a good phrase always as if it had that moment leapt to his mind.” Another reviewer made a blunter assessment: “There must be something radically wrong with the London theatre that it can find no permanent employment for this consummate actor.”

Although Rains did not immediately realize it, these were the last notices he would ever receive for his work on the British stage.