A PRIOR ENGAGEMENT WITH BETTE DAVIS prevented Claude Rains from attending his own mother's funeral.
Eliza Cox Rains died on May 13, 1942, during the production of Now, Voyager, Warners’ latest Bette Davis vehicle. Based on a best-selling novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, Voyager had begun production on April 7, with retakes continuing through June. There is no record of Rains having made any request for bereavement leave or, for that matter, his discussing his mother's death with anyone. Aside from his contractual commitments, the logistics of making an emergency transatlantic crossing during wartime would have been formidable. Years later he would sadly recall, “She shouldn't have died, I'm sure.” He put most of the blame on his father. “I don't know what he'd done with her, or about the doctor or anything. But I know that he didn't know how to look after her. He didn't realize the importance of it all.” Rains's sister reported that Frederick Rains had said of his famous son, “He's a great success. He's earning money. He can look after me.” Rains suspected that some of the money he had been sending for his mother's care may well have been diverted. “I'd pay the nursing home and send the checks to him. If he did any work, I didn't know about it. Tiny parts in pictures. People knew him. I remember his going to Paris, or France, anyway, and coming back with beautiful clothes. I'm quite sure, from what I heard about him and his general behavior, he was killing himself,” Rains said, alluding to his father's alcoholism.
Now, Voyager was a welcome assignment. Rains had just returned to Burbank after a loan-out to Twentieth Century–Fox for Moontide in a largely superfluous role supporting French heartthrob Jean Gabin in his American film debut. The assignment at Fox did, however, give Rains the chance to begin an enduring friendship with the film's screenwriter, novelist John O'Hara—despite O'Hara's having written Rains an enigmatic, walk-through part the actor could do little with. In contrast, Now, Voyager would be specifically developed and expanded to showcase his talents.
Warners wanted Rains to play Dr. Jaquith, an eminent psychiatrist. Jaquith effects a swanlike transformation of a mother-ridden ugly duckling named Charlotte Vale (Davis), who ends up romantically exchanging cigarettes with her star-crossed lover, played by Paul Henreid. But the studio once more attempted to cajole contractual concessions from Rains and his agent, on the basis that the role, though pivotal, was relatively small and the shooting schedule would exceed Rains's five-week guarantee. In his autobiography, Hal Wallis wrote that Rains “turned down the part, insisting it was too sketchy. [Screenwriter] Casey Robinson built up the role and Rains agreed to do it for the then enormous salary of $5,000 a week. I offered him $25,000 for six weeks but his agent Mike Levee was adamant and we went ahead with the required arrangement.”
It was hardly a victory for the actor and his agent, since Now, Voyager’s production fell in the third year of Rains's contract, which stipulated that in that year his salary would be $6,800 per week. Warners obviously intended to continue, outrageously, to renegotiate terms picture by picture. But for the moment, Rains knew he had a terrific part. He left it to Mike Levee eventually to settle the financial score.
Unlike Rains, whose role was specially tailored for him, Bette Davis was cast only after Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, and Ginger Rogers had fallen by the wayside. Davis would earn an Academy Award nomination for her role in this film. Now, Voyager was seen as groundbreaking on the topic of psychiatry, especially in its implications for women. The subject matter was provocative for its time, although it still indulged in some Freudian clichés about domineering mothers, as reflected in this scene between Rains and Davis's mother, played by the indomitable Gladys Cooper:
JAQUITH: She is most seriously ill.
MRS. VALE: Charlotte is—?
JAQUITH: Thanks to you.
MRS. VALE: Did you say—?
JAQUITH: My dear Mrs. Vale, if you had deliberately and maliciously planned to destroy your daughter's life, you couldn't have done it more completely.
MaRS. VALE: How? By having exercised a mother's rights?
JAQUITH: A mother's rights—twaddle! A child has rights. A person has rights—to discover her own mistakes, to make her own way, to grow and blossom in her own particular soil.
MRS. VALE: Are we getting into botany, Doctor? Are we flowers?
Unlike later screen psychiatrists, whose own demons often manage to rise uncomfortably close to the surface, Rains plays Dr. Jaquith as solid, professional, and compassionate. The New York Times praised Rains's “polished and even-tempered performance.” Davis herself was so taken with the character of the psychiatrist that in later years she opined that Charlotte Vale and Dr. Jaquith should have married and run his sanitarium together.
By the time he worked on Now, Voyager, Rains had some demons of his own and could perhaps have benefited from the professional services of a Dr. Jaquith. He was developing a serious alcohol problem, beginning to drink at noon and alternating scotch with Guinness stout. Still, not a single professional colleague ever recalled an occasion in which he seemed to be impaired, on the set or off, which only made the problem more insidious. Rains was a master actor who could convincingly play being sober. But the long-range effects would be devastating.
Casablanca, Rains's next film, could easily have been a mess of a movie. Based on an unproduced stage play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, Warners’ original announcements named Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan to play star-crossed lovers in a wartime melodrama set in French Morocco. The central character is Rick Blaine, a world-weary ex-lawyer from the states, who now runs the Café Americain in Casablanca. Ilsa Lund, Blaine's former heartthrob in Paris, shows up with a new love interest, a Czech resistance fighter named Victor Lazlo, whom she has married. Both are seeking elusive exit visas to escape Nazi-occupied territory.
The play outlines the bones of the story as we now know it; a major difference is that the Bergman character was originally an American named Lois Meredith. The studio wisely replaced the originally announced cast with Humphrey Bogart (after considering George Raft, who lobbied for the part) and Ingrid Bergman (Louis B. Mayer refused to loan out the services of Hedy Lamarr). Bogart and Bergman were both leery of committing their services to an unfinished script and wanted to escape the assignment as late as a week before principal photography began. Bergman was then under contract to David O. Selznick and complained to him vociferously about the loan-out: “You cannot sell me for something when you don't even know the story!” Indeed, there was no finished story or script; Warners had assigned the screenplay to Julius and Philip G. Epstein, who produced several treatments before going on to greener pastures. The completion of the script was the responsibility of a junior screenwriter, Howard Koch. Koch recalled sweating bullets at the prospect of turning forty preliminary pages into a finished screenplay within a matter of weeks.
Production on Casablanca, as the project was now called, commenced with half a script, and no one—producer, director, writer, and least of all the actors—had any idea where the story was heading. “I didn't know from one day to the other what we were going to do,” Bergman recalled.
I had a problem as there were two men, played by Paul Henreid and Humphrey Bogart, who were both in love with me, so I said to the writers, “Now which of these two men do I end up with?” And they said, “We haven't decided yet and are going to shoot it two ways.” “But this is impossible,” I said. “You must tell me because, after all, there is a little bit of difference in acting toward a man you love and another man for whom you just may feel pity or affection.” “Well, they said, don't make it too much of anything. Play it in between, you know, so we can decide in the end.”
Rains avoided the fray, to the point of brown-bagging his lunches and avoiding the studio commissary and its personalities and politics. He had been cast as the impish and charmingly corrupt prefect of police, Louis Renault (Rinaldo in the play). Industry censors had difficulty with implications in the original script that Renault was trading exit visas for sexual favors, and certain adjustments were made. For instance, in the shooting script, a desperate, beautiful woman without money begs Rick, “It used to be a villa at Cannes, or the very least, a string of pearls—now all I ask is an exit visa.” Rick rebuffs her, and Renault comments cynically, “How extravagant you are—throwing away women like that. Someday they may be rationed.” The Breen office insisted that “rationed” be changed to “scarce.” Another Rains line that the censor objected to (this one delivered to the Nazi major played by Conrad Veidt): “You enjoy war. I enjoy women. We are both very good at our jobs.” Breen asked that “enjoy” be changed to “like.” And so on.
Although a supporting role, the Renault character is pivotal to the plot. The audience knows he is compromised and therefore doesn't know whether to trust him until the very end of the film, when he betrays the Nazis and permits Ilsa and her husband to escape. Rains toys with the characters (and the audience) throughout the picture, maintaining suspense.
Rains greatly admired Bogart, who, like Rains, had done serious stage work in New York. After hours, Rains and Bogart occasionally drank together. Bogart drank by himself during working hours, at first discreetly and later indiscreetly. But during Casablanca, Bogart showed no obvious effects of alcohol, unlike his then-wife Mayo Methot, whom Rains (and everyone else in the studio) immediately recognized as a sloppy and aggressive drunk. Bogart's drinking had more subtle effects, such as an obsessively dictatorial manner, which expressed itself one day when Rains received a memo from Jack Warner, reprimanding him over some trivial matter. Rains was willing to laugh it off, but Bogart, suddenly menacingly serious, insisted that the actor immediately confront Warner, that he march directly to the front office and take the studio head to task for the “son of a bitch” he was. “You have to do it now!” Bogart ordered him, again and again, his voice rising. Rains found himself very nearly following the crazy instructions. “He was very persuasive.”
Quite unlike his friendly rapport with Bogart, Rains had taken an immediate dislike to second male lead Paul Henreid, whom he privately called “Paul Hemorrhoid.” The precise reason for their mutual animosity is unclear, but both men seem to have felt that the other was a pampered, demanding performer. Their next, and last, pairing, in Deception (1946) with Bette Davis, would give both actors the chance to play out their real-life conflict in a melodramatic context.
Actor Leonid Kinskey, who played the bartender at Rick's, remembered that Rains “always kept to himself and rarely participated in those little superficial conversations that take place between ‘takes,’” although he recalled “a warm, genuine smile” that emerged whenever Rains talked about his farm. “Looking back,” wrote Kinskey in 1972, “I have the impression that he loved uniforms and costumes. On our picture he glanced at himself in any mirror that his eye caught, constantly adjusting the military cap and tunic of his impeccable French uniform.”
Peter Lorre, who played the visa trafficker Ugarte in the film, recalled Rains's perfectionism and his “constantly studying” the script. At one point Lorre saw the chance for a prank that might break what the cast regarded as Rains's overly serious demeanor. A scene having nothing whatsoever to do with Casablanca was concocted and memorized by Lorre and others. “When he came in the next day and saw us rehearsing the scene,” recalled Lorre, “he was frantic. He called me aside and said, ‘Peter, something terrible has happened to me. I can't remember a single line.’ We all broke up and he wasn't even mad—just relieved that his memory wasn't failing.”
Rains enjoyed working again with Michael Curtiz (his most frequent director), though he didn't always agree with him about the interpretation of certain scenes. Once, to cut the tension after Curtiz asked him repeatedly to make an entrance with “more energy,” he responded by energetically bursting through the door on a bicycle.
“Mr. Rains is properly slippery and crafty as a minion of Vichy perfidy,” opined the New York Times in its original review of Casablanca. Louis Renault became a signature role for Rains, and his famous lines “Round up the usual suspects” and “I'm shocked, shocked” (to discover gambling at Rick's while simultaneously pocketing his own winnings) have deeply embedded themselves into the American vernacular.
Oddly enough, Rains's preference for Pennsylvania farm living may have secured the film's indelible final scene, in which Bogart looks forward to “the start of a beautiful friendship” with Rains as they walk away from the camera into a foggy airfield on the Burbank backlot. Because Casablanca was completely shot in Burbank, a foggy airstrip needed to be improvised on a soundstage. “They wanted a tremendous long view of the airport,” Bergman remembered. “so they had midgets in the background so that the people would look very small.”
According to Aljean Harmetz, the definitive Casablanca historian, “Claude Rains inadvertently saved the ending of the film. When the picture was finished and just about ready to be released, the Allies invaded North Africa. And that gave Warners the idea that they should change the ending of the movie. And they wrote a new scene, and in it Bogart and Claude Rains and a host of extras were on the deck of a freighter about to disembark on North African soil.” In a memo dated November 11, 1942, Hal Wallis wrote, “Rains is in Pennsylvania, and I'm asking Levee to get him out here as quickly as possible as I want to make these scenes this week if possible.” Given the wartime shortage of commercial air flights, getting Rains back that quickly proved impossible. And on November 12, David O. Selznick, who had seen the final cut, wired Wallis, praising Casablanca to the rafters and urging him not to touch the film, which had generated ecstatic audience responses at preview screenings. Wallis relented, and one of the most memorable final scenes in motion picture history was saved. Another late decision made the moment: “We needed a good punch line for the ending at the airport,” recalled Wallis, and Bogart recorded two alternates for his fade-out with Rains. The first—“Louis, I might have known you'd mix your patriotism with a little larceny”—was jettisoned in favor of the line that would become world- famous: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
In the end, Bogart and Bergman carried the show, but Rains supplied his usual ample support. It is rare indeed when such an assemblage of such perfectly cast, top-drawer talent (including Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, and Lorre) has been brought together for a single film. And rarely has any motion picture become quite so iconic, still drawing intense fascination and analysis more than sixty years after its release. The film won the Academy Award for best picture of 1943. Screenwriters Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch received an Oscar for the screenplay. Bogart and Rains were nominated for best actor and best supporting actor (Rains's second nomination), but neither won. The film was also nominated for best film editing (Owen Marks) and best music (Max Steiner).
Rains's next film, RKO's Forever and a Day (1943) was a well-meaning but rather muddled Hollywood tribute to the indomitable spirit of the British during the Blitz, and Rains was one of dozens of English actors in Hollywood who donated their services to the film, the proceeds of which were earmarked for the British War Effort and American polio research (President Roosevelt's charity of choice). Seventy-eight actors, twenty-one writers, and seven directors were involved in the epic, which took nearly two years to complete. Charles Laughton had a role, though no scenes with Rains. Forever and a Day used an air raid on Britain as a framework for a flashback-structured film recounting the history and inhabitants of an English manor house threatened by German bombs. Rains played a nineteenth-century villain with limited screen time. Variety gave him a rare pan: “Claude Rains…does not impress as the menace.”
While negotiating his client's latest Warners contract option, Mike Levee persuaded Rains to accept the title role in Universal's lavish Technicolor remake of Phantom of the Opera. Rains had reservations. He would be third-billed under Nelson Eddy and the eighteen-year-old soprano starlet Susanna Foster. The original 1925 film, starring Lon Chaney, was notable for its having one of the most grotesque makeup designs in Hollywood history, a living death's-head painfully constructed out of putty, wires, and Chaney's masochism.
Rains eventually accepted the role, with the proviso that the makeup would not be extreme. He was seriously concerned that a too-strong identification with the horror genre would impede his future chances of being cast in leading roles. A long series of negotiations with director Arthur Lubin and Universal's makeup head Jack Pierce ensued. Lubin was frustrated, knowing that the public wanted any remake of The Phantom to include a horrific visage. The unmasking scene and the chandelier crash were essential set pieces audiences would expect and demand. A studio that would eliminate either would do so at its box office peril.
Rains might have been more comfortable with Universal's earlier treatments of the remake. As early as 1936, the studio envisioned Boris Karloff in the role and considered making the Phantom's disfigurement psychological instead of physical—the traumatic result of World War I shell shock. Then, Universal's pairing of Deanna Durbin and Charles Laughton (then the newest “new Lon Chaney” in RKO's Hunchback of Notre Dame) in It Started with Eve led the studio to believe that Laughton's flair for grotesquerie and Durban's musicality might be a winning combination for a new Phantom.
No photographs of Jack Pierce's initial makeup tests on Rains exist, but Arthur Lubin remembered that the plans were repeatedly modified to accommodate Rains's comfort zone. Rains never commented on the makeup except to tell one reporter that it amounted to no more than a scar on his cheek. Unlike the original story, the Phantom's ugliness in the shooting script was not congenital but the result of an acid-burn disfigurement. As Erique Claudin, veteran first violinist of the Paris Opera, Rains is dismissed because of an arthritic left hand. He falls back on composing in order to support the singing career of his long-lost daughter, Christine, who has never known him. But when he mistakenly believes the score of his masterwork concerto has been stolen, he strangles a music publisher, whose assistant-mistress promptly throws a pan of engraving acid in his face. Hideously burned, he takes refuge in the catacombs of the Opera, where he descends into murderous dementia.
Lubin told film historian Scott MacQueen that Rains was so concerned about his burn makeup and its potential effect on his career that the director was forced to employ a hidden camera to capture needed footage during the unmasking scene. The initial shot, in which Susanna Foster rips off the mask, was compromised by a slightly out-of-focus zoom-in. Two perfectly focused head shots of Rains were subsequently inserted; these, apparently, are the surreptitious footage Lubin described. Rains never talked about his collaboration with Pierce, who was notoriously testy and autocratic. As it turned out, the final makeup was uncannily similar to the typical effects of the World War I gas that had blinded Rains in one eye, which doubtless added to his discomfort. Since he insisted on being masked until the very end of the film, Rains created a dilemma for himself somewhat parallel to being similarly unseen in The Invisible Man, and he held out for the most flattering mask possible. Lubin remembered “a great deal of argument” about the “testing of the damn mask.” But the result was brilliant—a pale blue, almost feline stylization of Rains's own face, allowing the actor to be perfectly recognizable even while disguised. The mask is believed to have been executed by Pierce's assistant (and later his successor at Universal), Bud Westmore.
In addition to Rains's anxiety over the makeup for his character, Lubin also recalled that Rains wanted to be certain that the scenes in which he played the violin and piano be completely convincing, and the actor practiced fingering techniques for weeks in advance of shooting. It was yet another example of the meticulous preparation so many of Rains's coworkers would comment upon throughout his career.
Reminiscent of the censor's concerns about Kings Row, Rains's Phantom of the Opera also pushed some incest buttons. In a scene deleted from the finished film, Nelson Eddy discovers the secret of Christine's paternity, but the audience has been led to believe that Claudin is romantically fixated on the young woman. The deletion only confused matters, though more than one newspaper reviewer intuited that Claudin was Christine's protective father, not her unrequited lover.
Rains's real-life daughter recalls a memorable Halloween following the release of the movie. Her father borrowed his costume from the Universal wardrobe department. Unable to find the original, custom mask, he substituted a Zorro-style one. He then proceed to take his daughter and two of her playmates on the rounds of neighbors’ houses. The girls hid under his cape as he rang each doorbell. When the householder opened the door, there was the Phantom of the Opera in person, intoning an old poem about All Hallow's Eve. The recitation complete, the Phantom threw open his cloak and the children, dressed as gremlins, jumped out, squealing “Trick or treat!” The gremlins were then invited inside for food, and the Phantom for drink, a ritual enacted a good number of times throughout the evening. Frances was the designated driver.
Back at Warners, Rains was cast in Passage to Marseilles, an ill-advised attempt to recapture some of Casablanca’s box office magic by reassembling several of the previous film's key performers—Bogart, Rains, Green-street, and Lorre, as well as director Curtiz—for a preachy wartime tale of French-Fascist conflict, with an escape from Devil's Island thrown in. Confusingly structured by screenwriters Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt with flashbacks inside of flashbacks, Passage gave Rains (second-billed) more screen time than Bogart, who played a doomed airman in the Free French Air Squadron. Rains played a dapper, eye-patch–sporting French captain who narrates the Bogart story line.
After Paul Henreid turned down the title role in Vincent Sherman's Mr. Skeffington opposite Bette Davis, Rains stepped into the part. The film was embattled from the start. During pre-production, Davis's second husband, Arthur Farnsworth, died under circumstances that have never been completely explained. Farnsworth collapsed on a Hollywood sidewalk and was dead two days later. A postmortem examination showed that the cause of death was a skull fracture suffered at least two weeks earlier. One theory, advanced by Davis biographer Charles Higham, posited that her husband had been attacked in retaliation for an extramarital affair and never reported the injury that ultimately killed him.
The tragedy only fed Davis's famously histrionic tendencies. She returned to work only a week after Farnsworth's death, and shortly thereafter began an affair with director Sherman, possibly as a power ploy. She did everything she could to seize control of the production. Jack Warner asked the Epstein brothers, who had written the screenplay, why the production was behind schedule. Their sardonic reply: “Because Bette Davis is a slow director.” As Rains later remembered Davis's general demeanor on the set of Mr. Skeffington and the other films in which they worked together, “She wants to photograph the thing, she wants to direct it, she wants to light it, and all that. But when it comes to her fellow players, she's wonderful.” Of Bette herself, he said, “I'm very fond of her and I'm very sorry for her. She doesn't know how to live with a man. She needs one badly. She makes mistakes all the time, puts men up on pedestals, but once they're up there—bam! None of them could take it.”
According to Rains, Mr. Skeffington was shot over a period of twenty weeks, a schedule he found excessive. Although he ultimately only worked his contracted weeks, the protracted production effectively prevented his being cast in other projects for the duration. Rains played Job Skeffington, a Manhattan stockbroker who falls under the charms of Fanny Trellis, a beautiful but monstrously self-centered socialite whose ne'er-do-well brother has stolen money from Skeffington. To protect her sibling, she seduces and marries the powerful, but nebbishy, financial magnate. Her humiliated brother exiles himself to the front lines of World War I and is promptly killed. Fanny blames Skeffington and proceeds to treat him like dirt until the next world war, during which he enlists and becomes missing in action. Fanny contracts diphtheria, which ravages her once legendary beauty and repels her entourage of sycophantic, would-be suitors. At the end of the war, Skeffington returns, a shell of his former self, broken and blinded in a German camp. Fanny welcomes him back, as he—a blind man—is the only person who can appreciate her for something other than her lost physical charms.
Mr. Skeffington was one of only a handful of World War II Hollywood films to address anti-Semitism, however gingerly. Rains had strong personal feelings on the topic; his wife was Jewish, and he believed there might be Jewish blood far back in his own lineage. He had difficulty playing a scene with Davis, in which the custody of their daughter is at issue. On the verge of being deployed to wartime Europe, Skeffington resists taking his half-Jewish daughter with him (for obvious reasons, which he sensitively explains to the child in what is arguably the film's only emotionally realistic scene). Rains, whose own daughter was half-Jewish by way of her mother, bridled at performing the scene as written, which startled Davis. “He forgot his character and I sat there in absolute shock. My great friend, whom I would have done anything on God's earth for in a scene, turned on me personally. I shook all over. I was so frightened of him in that scene, it was unbelievable.”
Still, director Vincent Sherman had nothing but accolades for Rains. “Rains had great concentration, knew his attitude in each scene, played with his partner, and created an inner life for his character. He was a professional in the best sense of the word. While he came on the set prepared, he always left room for the director to create with him.”
Critics were appalled by the glamorization of such a thoroughly unsympathetic creature as Fanny Skeffington. In his review of Mr. Skeffington, James Agee opined that the character (and, by extension, Davis herself) “demonstrates the horrors of egocentricity on a marathonic scale.” Despite the film's deficiencies, Rains was nominated a third time for an Academy Award for best supporting actor; once again, he lost.
With Rains employed steadily during this time, the family found themselves spending an increasing amount of time at their home in Brentwood. As his daughter recalled, “Jimmy Stewart lived across the street. The only interaction we had with him was to say hello when he came shuffling down the driveway in his bathrobe and slippers to pick up the newspaper. Lee Strasberg lived across the street, about three doors down. His daughter Susan and I were very good friends. A great teacher, but a very odd man. He never sat down during dinner; he'd just stand there at the table, reading to himself.” The Henry Fonda family also lived nearby, and Jennifer was friendly with young Jane.
Rains detested Hollywood pretension. He enrolled his daughter in the Brentwood Town and Country School, which had a reputation for not treating movie stars’ children like movie stars’ children. One neighborhood parent, James Mason, was rumored to have bought the school simply in order to fire sycophantic teachers.
If the Rainses’ neighborhood had a social queen bee, it was Joan Crawford, also a Warner Bros. star, with whom Rains had oddly never been paired by the studio, although he would be briefly considered for the role Sydney Greenstreet played opposite her in 1947’s Flamingo Road. Around the time she won the Oscar for Mildred Pierce, Crawford called Frances, inviting Jennifer to attend a birthday party for her adopted daughter Christina. Frances said her daughter would be happy to attend. How should she dress? Dungarees would be fine, Crawford said.
When Jennifer arrived at the party—an elaborate backyard affair, complete with a pony—she was humiliated to find that she was the only girl wearing jeans. The other Hollywood mothers had dressed their daughters competitively in elegant pinafores. Jennifer looked like the farm girl she actually was. Christina dutifully took her to meet her mother, who was reclining on a chaise in a white robe and turban, attended by both a manicurist and a pedicurist. Both girls curtsied. Crawford looked Jennifer up and down. “It was very nice to meet you,” she said, one eyebrow slightly raised. “And now, you may leave.”
Christina took Jennifer to see her doll collection, which was housed in a cabana-style structure adjacent to the swimming pool. Jennifer loved dolls and looked forward to playing with Christina's collection, the largest, most exquisite one she had ever seen.
“Oh, no,” said Christina, sadly. “We can't ever touch them. We can only look.” Then she closed the door on the strange mausoleum of the dolls, and the girls returned to the party. Jennifer never visited again.
Her father's next freelance assignment was in an ill-timed ideological film, Strange Holiday (1945), an impassioned screed by Arch Oboler, a radio drama maven perhaps best known for his legendary series Lights Out. Oboler's script railed at American complacency about the Nazi threat, but the film was released after the war had actually ended and did poor business. The project had started as a short subject and was unwisely expanded to feature length, with Rains called upon to provide ineffective padding in a tale of a fantastic, fascistic takeover of America. In its way, Strange Holiday was not unlike the cold war propaganda films of the 1950s. Despite the film's shortcomings, Rains greatly admired Oboler, and it would not be the last time they worked together.
In This Love of Ours, produced by Universal in 1945, Rains was second-billed under Merle Oberon, playing a sardonic café caricaturist. The script was based on a play by Luigi Pirandello and directed by William Dieterle, who had earlier wanted Rains for The Hunchback of Notre Dame at RKO. The New York Times opined that Rains “is altogether delightful and contributes some mildly amusing moments in an otherwise doggedly tragic drama.”
By 1945, Rains was not happy with his languishing situation at Warner Bros. and the lackluster outside work he was forced to take. Therefore, when Mike Levee asked him if he would consider the male lead in the British film version of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, to be shot in wartime England with Vivien Leigh as his costar, he wasted no time in accepting. He didn't know at the time that the assignment would have unforeseen intrigues and convolutions leading to his becoming the most highly compensated performer in film history.
The heavily armed, four-engine Avro Lancaster bomber set down at Prestwick, Scotland, shortly before noon on an overcast day in May 1944. It had been decided that military air transport across the Atlantic was the only safe option for Rains's travel. Within an hour the actor was aboard a commercial aircraft bound for London, where a limousine and an elegant emissary of the J. Arthur Rank Organization was waiting for him. This splendid figure, with striped trousers, frock coat, bowler, furled umbrella, and lemon kid gloves, seemed oblivious to the grim grey mantle of war and the noisy death that was raining down. The Battle of Britain had long since been decided, but the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs continued, hurtling earthward, erratic and unannounced.
The Rank envoy's only reference to the war during the long drive into London was his apology for not being able to find quarters in the country, “where it is safe.” Instead, Rains would be housed temporarily in a suite at the Savoy. Rains's only concern at the moment was to find a police station near the Savoy and register, as the law required, as an alien.
“A police station? Good lord, Mr. Rains, what have you done?”
“I haven't done anything, except become an American citizen. I am required to register.”
For all his decorum, the Rank man could not disguise his disgust. “Bloody nonsense,” he said with a snort. “Once an Englishman, always an Englishman.” The subject was not discussed further.
By the time the limousine had reached the Strand and was in sight of the Savoy, a covey of rockets was evidently looming overhead, for antiaircraft batteries suddenly began to thunder. Rains noticed a perceptible increase in the walking speed of pedestrians; some were scurrying toward shelters. As the car pulled up to the hotel entrance, fragments of the bursting flak shells were falling in the streets, a kind of metallic hail.
“Good evening, Mr. Rains,” said the doorman, seemingly unperturbed. “I trust you've had a comfortable journey.” His voice was steady, if pitched a trifle above the din. He made no reference to the buzz bombs or falling shrapnel.
Rains asked if there was a bomb shelter. There was, but the doorman didn't think he'd be comfortable there. “It's crowded, and there's not much air. Why don't you do what I do?”
“What do you do?”
“Well, sir, I go to bed, put a pillow over my face and a pillow over my vitals. And pray.”
There would be frequent food shortages during his stay, but one of the hotel waiters was an admirer and personally brought the actor special meals from his partially bombed-out home. Rains was struck by the man's unruffled stoicism and asked him how he personally dealt with the relentless bombardment and omnipresent possiblity of death.
“To be honest about it, sir,” the waiter replied, “sometimes I just shit my pants.”
Rains had been in London nearly two weeks, conferring occasionally with Gabriel Pascal, the producer and director of Caesar and Cleopatra, and visiting the studio at suburban Denham, before he was finally summoned by George Bernard Shaw for a meeting at his venerated estate at Ayot St Lawrence in Buckinghamshire, an hour's drive from London. Shaw's wife had died, and the old playwright was living with only his housekeeper. Pascal met Rains at the door as the limousine arrived and escorted him to the study, where they waited in relative silence for several minutes. Shaw, wearing a tweed jacket and knickers, finally entered, shook Rains's hand with reasonable enthusiasm, and then retreated to a small wooden armchair facing the fireplace. Pascal moved quickly to an adjoining chair, leaving Rains in the center of the room, staring awkwardly at their backs. Rains felt a mounting mixture of humiliation and anger. Perhaps he can't stand the sight of me, he thought. After all, Shaw had written the play for Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a handsome, manly giant, and now he is confronted with the prospect of a relative dwarf in the role. Rains was wondering whether he should leave the room when Shaw, without moving or even turning his head, spoke.
“I understand you're now a movie actor,” spitting out the key word with sufficient force to convey his frequently stated contempt for Hollywood.
“Yes, Mr. Shaw,” Rains replied softly.
“I also understand you have a farm, and that you're happy. You also have a child. You always wanted a child. You were unhappy in this country.”
“Yes, Mr. Shaw.”
Rains assumed that Shaw was maliciously toying with him, but refrained, with some difficulty, from saying so. He only glared at the pair of bunched backs before him. “Tell me about yourself,” said Shaw. “How many of my plays have you done?”
Haltingly, Rains recited a list of eight or nine.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“Yes, Mr. Shaw. I was a tutor at the Royal Academy, and we were doing one of your plays. I asked you to come and lecture the class, and you did.”
“Oh, no,” replied the great man. “We met long before that. At His Majesty's Theatre. You were a boy of sixteen. Frederick Whalen was doing one of my plays at his afternoon theatre. I went to the rehearsals and sat in a box to the right of the proscenium. Don't you remember? I became ill one day with a kidney stone. You went for the doctor. Do you remember the doctor's name?”
Rains paused uncomfortably as he tried to ferret the doctor's name from the ashes of memory, marveling that Shaw, nearing ninety, could recall such ancient trivia.
“Yes,” Rains said, awed at his own sudden recollection. “It was Dr. Matthews. In Suffolk Street. I ran all the way.”
Another long silence followed. Pascal squirmed in his chair.
“You were at His Majesty's all those years,” resumed Shaw. “You must have met a lot of interesting people. Does any one of them stand out in your memory?”
“Yes, Mr. Shaw. I remember Basil Gill and his rich, rolling voice. It was the first voice that impressed me.”
Shaw waved his hand irritably.
“Never mind the men. Tell me about the women.”
“Well, of course, there was Ellen Terry…” Rains smiled inwardly, for he knew Shaw had carried on an ardent correspondence with the actress, who had been Henry Irving's most celebrated leading lady. Rains himself always thought that Terry was overrated as a performer, but he kept that bit of information to himself.
At the mention of Terry's name, Shaw leapt to his feet in a surprising display of agility for a nonagenarian. He pulled his chair away from the fire and gave it to Rains.
“Let's talk about her,” said Shaw, seemingly rejuvenated and grinning mischievously.
After they had exhausted the subject of Terry, Shaw turned the discussion to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who had created the role of Eliza Doolittle for Shaw's original production of Pygmalion in 1914. Shaw had also had a passionate correspondence with Campbell, one that amounted to an unrequited love affair. Shaw, a strict vegetarian, recalled a comment Campbell had made about his larger appetites. “She once said to me,” whispered Shaw, “‘The day you eat a steak, G.B.S., God help the women and children.’”
Shaw cackled delightedly over the anecdote, then turned to Pascal, whose presence at the meeting had been manifested by no more than an occasional fidget. “It is time,” Shaw told him, “to send for the tea and crumpets.” Pascal rose and headed for the door.
When Rains left Ayot St Lawrence, Pascal told him that he and Vivien Leigh were scheduled to meet the press the following morning in the lobby of the Savoy.
“I can't make a speech,” Rains protested.
“You don't have to. Just be chatty. The press thinks very highly of you, you know—coming over here from safe California in the middle of the air raids just to make a film.”
Indeed, Rains was so disarmed by the reporters’ deference that he impulsively told them, in some detail, of his encounter the day before with Shaw.
“I don't think he really wanted me,” Rains said. “I think he was asking me all those questions and deliberately embarrassing me just to find out what kind of man I am.”
His remarks, of course, appeared in print, and Shaw promptly issued a denial. Rains received a postcard. “Dear Mr. Rains,” wrote Shaw. “You are quite mistaken. I made up my mind about you in the first split second.”
Rains, however, was unconvinced. While Shaw might deny that he was testing the actor, what other explanation could there be for his odd behavior? Pascal reassured him. “Actually, he made up his mind long before you ever got here.”
This was true only to a point. Pascal didn't tell Rains that the role had first been offered to John Gielgud, who turned it down because of his personal dislike of Pascal. When Rains's casting became common knowledge in theatrical London, Pascal related, a coalition of actors he refused to identify approached Shaw to lodge a protest. Rains was no longer a British actor, they told him, merely an expatriate Hollywood curiosity. They even sought to cast doubt on his professional competence and attempted to demolish Rains's stature in Shaw's mind. They reminded him that the actor's personal life was anything but blemish-free. He had left England only to cause a highly publicized marital scandal; he had been married two other times; and, frankly, he was known to be a bit of a rogue with the ladies. Shaw and the reputation of his film would suffer by association with Rains. Why not Laurence Olivier? Why not Paul Scofield? Why not anybody else?
Shaw pondered the impassioned accusations for several minutes while the committee of actors glared unhappily. Then Shaw leaned forward in his chair and cleared his throat.
“What you're saying,” he said, “is that Rains has balls. Well, Caesar has balls, and Rains shall play him.”
Rains granted interviews with the press as the Rank Organization requested, but after the London Star quoted Rains as saying jovially that he and Shaw had talked for hours on everything but the subject of Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw interceded testily. On April 27, 1944, he wrote Pascal. “This press foolishness must stop immediately. You and I, Rank and Rains, have a first-class publicity which cannot be improved on; but it can be spoilt and made offensive by such silly rubbish as appears in the papers today, the work evidently of the press agent whom you so wickedly planted on me on Tuesday.” Henceforth, “unless our proceedings are treated as sacredly private I will take no part in them. A report of what passes at rehearsal or production is worse than the betrayal of a confession. The Americans do not know this; they have no sense of privacy; but you must not Americanize the British studios. Get rid of all your press people: they damage you every time, and offend everyone else.”
Caesar and Cleopatra was originally performed on the London stage in 1907. On one level an arch historical comedy, the play is also a gentle sociosexual satire. Unlike Shakespeare's telling of the tale in Anthony and Cleopatra, in Shaw's play Caesar is not infatuated with the Egyptian queen. Rather, he is amused by her kittenish demeanor and enjoys her eventual coming of age, acting as her avuncular mentor.
Caesar's avid supervision of Cleopatra's transformation prefigures Henry Higgins's more vigorous efforts to make a lady out of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. It was Pygmalion that first brought Shaw and Pascal together. The director had been a devotee from an early age, when he first read Shaw's plays in translation in his native Hungary. He began his film career in Germany in 1922 and produced his first English-language feature in 1936. He dogged Shaw relentlessly, hoping for a chance to film his plays. Pascal was the only producer who made it clear he had no intention of compromising Shaw's texts. As Shaw recalled,
Until he descended on me out of the clouds, I could find nobody who wanted to do anything with my films but mutilate them, murder them, give their cadavers to the nearest scrivener, without a notion of how to tell the simplest story in dramatic action, and instructed that there must be a new picture every ten seconds, and that the duration of the whole feature must be forty-five minutes at the extreme outside. The result was to be presented to the public with my name attached, and an assurance that nobody need fear that it had any Shavian quality whatever, and was real genuine Hollywood.
Shaw turned down Samuel Goldwyn, who had made an offer for the screen rights to his plays, in favor of the virtually unknown Pascal, who in 1938 produced a remarkably faithful screen adaptation of Pygmalion for the Rank Organization starring Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Since Shaw did the screenplay himself, the textual fidelity is hardly surprising. Pygmalion proved wildly popular and lucrative for its backers. Major Barbara followed in 1941, also starring Wendy Hiller. Like Caesar and Cleopatra, it was shot in Denham against a real-life background of German air raids, which repeatedly interrupted production.
In his writings, Shaw often waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities of film as a new dramatic medium, but his own adapted screenplays amounted to workmanlike, slightly elaborated transcripts of his stage work with no real cinematic innovation, and he demanded approval of almost every aspect of production, no matter how small. Changes that cost very little in a stage production take on a completely different dimension on a major motion picture set, with hundreds of people on the payroll. Fussing with the makeup or hair color or costume of a supporting player after photography has begun can create major problems, both in budget and continuity. Shaw never acknowledged his own responsibility in the soon-to-be-legendary cost overruns on Caesar, but his participation certainly contributed to the problem. Although Shaw described Pascal as “one of those extraordinary men who turn up occasionally, say once in a century, and may be called godsends in the arts to which they are devoted,” the playwright attempted to deflect blame away from himself. “He shocks me by his utter indifference to the cost,” he said of Pascal; “but the result justifies him. The man is a genius.”
Still, wrote Shaw, “I pity poor Rank,” adding, “The film will cost a million. On Thursday there were hundreds of men in the studio; and only twelve at most had anything to do but take snapshots and pick up scraps of my conversation for sale to the papers. Most of them did not even do that much. Were they all on the payroll?” Shaw also objected to the number of retakes that were required, some the result of VivienLeigh's supposedly sloppy enunciation. Leigh, who had expected to begin work on the film a few years earlier, seemed to have lost much of her passion for the part. She quibbled with Shaw over a line involving Rains. In Shaw's play, Cleopatra calls Caesar “old and stringy,” which Rains obviously wasn't. Shaw, who retained iron control over his dialogue, told Leigh to instead say, “You are hundreds of years old, but have a nice voice.” But in the finished film, she says, “You are old and rather wrinkly.” Exactly how this compromise was reached is not documented.
Meanwhile, Pascal's competence to manage the huge production as well as direct it came under increasing fire, not only from the cast and crew but from the press as well. Flora Robson, who played Cleopatra's nurse, Ftatateeta, complained directly to Shaw, bluntly telling him that he “should not have a director of an English film who does not understand English. He makes actors overact to explain the meaning to him.” Although Pascal was proficient in English, it was not his first language, and he spoke with a strong Hungarian accent. Robson recalled that Both Rains and Leigh complained directly to the Rank Organization about the ponderous pace of shooting and equally ponderous direction, which, they felt, completely undermined Shaw's comedy. Rank officials disagreed, and Rains eventually gave up protesting. “What else can we do?” he asked Robson.
Rains bickered with Pascal and Shaw over his on-screen headwear; the actor wanted more screen time with his helmet or laurel crown, which was denied. The reason for Rains's concern is obvious: the close-cropped Caesar haircut made impossible the trick he had developed of combing his hair back and up to add an inch or so to his height. The helmet and laurel leaves created an illusion of additional stature. Pascal was doing little, if anything, with the camera to mitigate the obvious disparity between Rains's height and that of the rest of the cast. Rains offered a different explanation for his concern about the headgear. “The first authority I looked up was Plutarch,” Rains told an interviewer. “He said Caesar was a very good dresser, very fussy about his hair. He combed it a lot because he was going bald.”
In the actor's opinion, Pascal “drowned” Shaw's story in spectacle. He was especially critical of the director's treatment of Caesar's farewell to Cleopatra, which he felt should have been handled intimately: “Pascal staged it grandly on a staircase and killed the poignancy of the scene.” Rains never commented on his working relationship with Vivien Leigh, whose temperament could be the equal of Bette Davis's. But he could not have been unaware of her miscarriage (her second), which halted production for nearly six weeks—she had slipped on a marble floor while flogging a slave in a scene involving Rains—or of her tormented marriage to Laurence Olivier, or of the gnawing manic depression that would bedevil her until her death. One of her first manic episodes occurred on the set of Caesar and Cleopatra; she subsequently apologized to the entire company in writing for disrupting the production.
The weather also made for problems, necessitating additional weeks of delays when the sun refused to shine and making it impossible to match outdoor scenes with previously shot footage. Pascal made the radical decision to move the production, in the middle of the shoot, to Egypt. Among other things, this necessitated transporting a miniature sphinx, which figured prominently in several completed scenes and, as Pascal's widow, Valerie, noted, “had no counterpart in Egypt.” The fact that so much valuable cargo space was allocated to transporting movie props during the war incensed both the press and members of Parliament, who were already outraged at the film's runaway budget during a time of rationing and privation for most of the British population.
Valerie Pascal recalled that a rumor was begun in the press that Pascal was importing sand to the Egyptian desert as well as props. But reality was even stranger, she wrote. “The sun was shining in Egypt, all right, but the natives somehow got access to the props, found the glue of the papier-mâché shields nourishing, and ate them up.” The starving, poorly paid Egyptian extras did indeed find the paste, a simple mixture of flour and water, to be edible. More than three hundred new shields had to be fabricated in England and shipped, causing more delays.
All the principals grew restless. Marjorie Deans, the official chronicler of the film, took a catty swipe at Rains in her book Meeting at the Sphinx, perhaps reflecting the contretemps with the press and Shaw's displeasure. “Professionally he is not an easy man to deal with,” she wrote. “One has the impression, indeed, that he has never found himself easy to deal with! He has none of Vivien Leigh's facility and grace.”
Pascal, who had been a favorite of Shaw ever since his film of Pygmalion, let the production grow out of control in a way that would only be eclipsed by Fox's bloated production of Cleopatra two decades later. Caesar and Cleopatra was plagued by expensive delays and technical problems from beginning to end. The expense, however, benefited Shaw, Pascal, and Rank, each in his own perverse way. Shaw, whose antipathy to Hollywood was legendary, finally had the power to call the shots. Pascal was able to feed his inflated sense of self in his deluded belief that he was an equal collaborator with Shaw. Rank, who was already planning his own defection to Hollywood, believed that Caesar and Cleopatra would be his calling card—proof that British films and filmmakers could compete in terms of budget and extravagance with anything the American industry had to offer.
The filming schedule overran Rains's British work permit, necessitating huge wartime taxes that drove Rains's official compensation to over a million dollars, though his own net receipts were on par with his usual Hollywood contracts ($100,000 for nine months’ work). Nonetheless, Claude Rains, a mere Hollywood contract player, suddenly found his earnings surpassing those of the biggest stars in the industry—at least on paper. The Rank Organization never made public its final accounting on Caesar and Cleopatra, but a reasonable estimate of costs, based on trade magazine speculation, was about £1,500,000, with the wartime exchange rate being approximately £4 to each dollar. Red ink at the time of the first American release was believed to be in the vicinity of $3 million.
One day during shooting in Denham, Rains passed by a pool of extras. To the astonishment of the actor who “couldn't eat his notices” in London, he saw that he was now supported by almost half the talent of the darkened West End. One of the day players was an old acquaintance. It was Henry Ainley, who hadn't made a film in eight years and was in the last year of an alcohol-ravaged life. Ainley's jealousy was just as acute as it had been when he had tried to sabotage Rains's performance in The Jest almost a quarter century earlier. Encountering the younger actor, Ainley glowered.
“That part should have been mine,” he asserted.
“There was really nothing I could say,” Rains remembered; so he simply walked away.
The profligate cost overruns, poor box office, and mixed critical reception of Caesar and Cleopatra effectively ended Gabriel Pascal's career; today, many standard motion picture biographical references don't even mention his name. Shaw reportedly disliked Leigh's performance and wished he hadn't cast her in the first place. But the film garnered Rains enormous publicity (most of it exaggerating his salary) and set the stage for one of his best roles in Hollywood, in the hands of another famously controlling director.