MIKE LEVEE, RAINS’S AGENT, called his client one day. Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in Rains's services. Could he have a meeting?
Hitchcock was casting a film called Notorious, a tale of postwar intrigue and espionage revolving around an expatriate Nazi cell in Rio de Janeiro, starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Bergman would play Alicia Huberman, a woman with a checkered background who is conscripted by American intelligence to seduce and marry a mother-dominated Nazi, Alexander Sebastian, who is suspected of trafficking in uranium. A performer of special elegance and cosmopolitan charm was required. Rains was intrigued.
“Tell me,” said Hitchcock. “How will you play this fellow? With a German accent?”
“Oh, no. You've got real Germans. This man has been to Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, and I was thinking about Oxford.”
“And Brixton?” Hitchcock asked bluntly.
Rains was slightly startled. “How did you know?”
“I found out everything about you. I wanted to know.”
Hitchcock's first choice for the role had been Clifton Webb, whose arch screen persona would likely have underscored the subtextual implications of homosexuality in the mother-dominated character. But the story called for Sebastian to be genuinely, achingly in love with the Bergman character, and Webb would arguably have been not quite believable in the part. Rains would play it with great subtlety and convincing pathos.
Hitchcock then changed the subject. “What about this business of being a midget?”
“What do you mean, a midget?” There were no midgets mentioned in the script.
“Your wife, Miss Bergman, is very tall. There are occasions when we can build a ramp, but have you ever worn elevated shoes?”
Rains, recounting the story years later, said that at this, “My pride took a bit of a setback. I protested, but he insisted in a gentle way and I bought them.” He added, “I finally got used to them, and I've used them many times since.”
Most accounts of the making of Notorious mention Rains's use of lifts in his shoes and ramps to bring him up to Bergman's stature (Humphrey Bogart famously wore platform footwear for several scenes opposite the actress in Casablanca). On the first day of shooting, Rains was talking to Bergman. Hitchcock crept up and jerked up the cuff of Rains's trousers, displaying the shoes. “The shame of Rains,” he intoned.
A close viewing of the film reveals very little obvious chicanery with Rains's height. Hitchcock in fact uses the disparity in height to visually underscore the shifting power dynamics between characters. There are several long shots of Rains and Bergman walking together at what appears to be their natural height (Rains was about 5'6” and Bergman about 5'9”); these are scenes in which Bergman's character seems to be gaining confidence and control. But in other key scenes, such as Sebastian and Alicia's first meeting in a restaurant, as well as the bedroom scene in which Sebastian almost discovers his wife's crucial theft of a key, Hitchcock brings his performers to a level plane. At one scene in a restaurant, Rains seems to be sitting on the equivalent of a telephone book, the better to look Bergman directly in the eye.
Notorious is a sterling example of Hitchcock's use of the “MacGuffin,” his pet word for an inanimate object or other arbitrary device that drives the story. In this case, it was a bottle in Sebastian's wine cellar filled with granulated uranium. This was not a particularly good way to transport a radioactive substance, but it was an excellent way to stage a suspenseful sequence in which Rains painfully realizes he has been set up by Bergman and American intelligence.
Rains made no recorded comment about working again with Cary Grant, who had made such a poor impression on him during the filming of The Last Outpost; for Notorious, Rains was content simply to walk away with the show. As one Canadian reviewer noted, “It is difficult not to find Rains’ baggy-eyed, shrewd-face villainy more interesting, and therefore more sympathetic, than the virtue of Cary Grant.”
Notorious earned Rains his fourth, and last, Academy Award nomination. He lost again, but never made a comment to anyone about his obvious disappointment. Meanwhile, he and Hitchcock developed a social relationship. “At dinners at his house,” Rains remembered, “he'd fill himself with beef and wine and we'd all go into the living room, indulging in a little light conversation. Suddenly you'd look at Hitch and he'd be sound asleep. But such a joy. A warm, understanding man. His wife and daughter would be there, carrying the conversation. A dear man.” One evening, with the director snoring and the conversation growing thin, Rains quietly suggested to Frances that it might be time to leave. Hitchcock woke instantly. “What?” he asked. “Am I boring you?” Rains recalled “unusual things, charming things” that Hitchcock would do, including “putting a box of my favorite cigars in the car seat so I would find it when I drove home. Or bottles of wine.”
If Rains's next assignment, as Nick in Angel on My Shoulder for United Artists, came across as the flip side of the heavenly emissary he played in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, it should have come as no surprise. Both films were based on original stories by the same writer, Harry Segall, who wrote the screenplay for Angel in collaboration with Roland Kibbee. In Angel, Rains played the devil, with fellow Theatre Guild alumnus Paul Muni as a murdered gangster condemned to hell. Rains offers Muni a deal: he will let him return to earth in the form of a prominent, do-gooding judge for whom the gangster happens to be a perfect double. The gangster thus has the opportunity to carry out revenge on his killer, and the devil has the chance to use the possessed judge to spread earthly corruption and evil and thereby increase the population of the nether world.
Rains plays the demon with sardonic relish, thanks to an exceptionally witty screenplay, his black-clad presence heightened by the moody shadows and angled lighting of cinematographer James Van Trees. Seldom has the glow of hellfire been used to such atmospheric effect. But the overall fun of the finished picture was marred by what seemed to be a jinx. Both Muni and lead actress Anne Baxter were waylaid by illness; an assistant director died; and, to top it all off, the body of a studio technician, who had apparently fallen drunkenly from a catwalk, was discovered behind the papier-mâché inferno set during the film's wrap party, generating lurid headlines.
Immediately following Angel on My Shoulder Rains was assigned one of his best Hollywood roles, one that deserved to earn him another Oscar nomination (but that inexplicably failed to do so). In Warners’ Deception he was cast opposite Bette Davis in a screenplay based on the drama Jealousy by Louis Verneuil, son-in-law of Sarah Bernhardt, in several of whose plays Rains had acted in his London days. The original play involved a married female artist who was compromised, both sexually and artistically, by a relationship with her mentor. It had previously been produced as a silent (and now lost) film with Fredric March and Jeanne Eagels in 1929. The play's audacious conceit was to never depict the mentor, just the conflict between husband and wife. Hollywood, however, had different ideas. In Deception, the mentor is fleshed out as a monstrous, but genius, composer, Alexander Hollenius, who contrives to destroy the musical career of his protégée-lover's former romantic interest, who was believed to have been lost in the war but miraculously turns up alive at the start of the film. Rains was given dominance in scene after scene, with some of the most deliciously wicked dialogue ever written for him. Davis's character seems pallid in comparison. Rains was also given the chance to torment his professional nemesis, Paul Henreid, especially in a scene (reportedly done in one take by Rains, to the applause of the crew) in which Hollenius plays cat and mouse with the Davis and Henreid characters in a restaurant, where he orders course after course, discussing gastronomy instead of the master concerto he has composed and Henreid is desperate to play.
After the first read-through, Davis said drily, “That's quite a part you've got there, Claudie.”
The film was not a critical success, and Davis took most of the brickbats. “The censors ruined it,” she would later complain. And, indeed, the industry moral guardians caviled endlessly about the essentially amoral triangle at the center of the story and demanded change after change. Finally, to square things up, Davis murders Rains and gets her criminal comeuppance. Director Irving Rapper objected to the ending, but maintained that it was Davis who demanded the blood and thunder. Rapper felt the film “should have been concluded as a comedy, and the writer, John Collier, intended it that way. It was to have a gay, light, natural ‘So what?’ ending. The three people walk off as friends. But Bette wanted a dramatic conclusion; she insisted on it, and I didn't care very much either way, so I gave in.”
The critics found the story ludicrous, but no one found fault with Rains's performance. As Newsweek observed, “It is the character of Hollenius, epicure, egomaniac, and sadist, that lifts the film from its soap opera situation. For [John] Collier and his collaborator [Joseph Than] have improved on the French playwright by turning this vague, offstage figure into a sinister and highly articulate menace. And in playing the role Rains has one of the best roles of his career.”
The part was so vividly portrayed that many viewers assumed it had been based on a real music celebrity. As Rains recalled, “A friend of [Leopold] Stokowski came on the set one day and said, ‘I know who that is, that's Stokowski.’ And then another day someone who knew [Arturo] Toscanini said, ‘I know who that is, that's Toscanini.’ I was told that the man resembled [Jean] Sibelius a little. But I know little about Sibelius, and Hollenius certainly was not based on him. John Collier, as good a writer as there is, did a wonderful character on paper. If the character is based on anyone, it's based on John Collier's.”
Not long after Deception’s release, Davis paid a visit to Stock Grange. Her first words, delivered with great good humor: “You son of a bitch, you stole the picture.” Years later, she would elaborate: “Claude Rains rightfully stole the picture. It was up to him to work against the dialogue and to make the audience understand, through his jealousy, that they had been having a hot affair, and that he was not just her piano teacher. He worked like ten men on that movie.”
Despite Rains's Herculean efforts in Deception, Warners chose not to renew his long-term contract. The final straw came before the film's release, when Mike Levee wrestled once more with Jack Warner about Rains's billing and salary. Levee wrote Warner:
In view of the fact that Mr. Rains has been co-starred with Vivien Leigh in a five million dollar picture, “CAESAR & CLEOPATRA” and is being co-starred with Paul Muni in “ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER” in the same size type as Paul Muni, and because it is my intention that I will not, in the future, commit him to any other outside picture without receiving co-star billing, I wonder if I cannot prevail upon you to grant him the assurance that when “DECEPTION” is released that he will be co-starred with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid.
Rains received same-line, same-size billing for Deception, but Warner balked at Levee's insistence on a $75,000 guarantee per picture, and the studio declined to renew its option on Rains's services. The following year, the actor returned briefly to the studio for his first and only top-billed assignment for Warners, teaming with Michael Curtiz for their last picture together. The Unsuspected was an unabashed piece of hokum in which Rains plays a popular radio personality, Victor Grandison, whose weekly mystery program milks a real murder, about which Grandison has far too much personal knowledge. Stylishly shot in brooding noir style, the film was a financial, if not a critical, success. For Rains, though, The Unsuspected was only the palest shadow of his best work at Warner Bros. The studio had been making less and less use of his talents, to the actor's frustration. (Bette Davis was struggling with the same issue and would be released from her contract not long after Rains's departure.) For the time being, at least, Rains was happy to be a free agent, and more than happy to give up his residence in Los Angeles and base himself, Frances, and Jennifer permanently in Pennsylvania. Thereafter, when asked by her schoolmates what her father did for a living, Jennifer would reply, “He's a farmer.”
Jennifer loved full-time life on the farm. In addition to helping with planting and harvesting, she learned from her father how to shoot a rifle and, like Rains in his Scottish Regiment days, became a crack shot, expert in picking tin cans off a fence. “Growing up as the only child of an actor noted for his beautiful speech was a burden—oddly enough not for me, but for my father,” she remembered. “He was determined that I would not have the Pennsylvania accent, that I would pronounce my words ‘succinctly,’ and in that he was successful.” For a short time when she was about seven she began stammering, just as her father had as a boy. “The cure for stuttering was to sing everything. I remember us sitting around the dining room table. The cook would enter the room with a silver dish holding the vegetables. ‘Here are the peas, Mr. Rains,’ she would sing in her gospel-singer's voice. Enjoying this therapy immensely, my father would belt out, ‘Pass them to Jennifer first, she must eat the peas before she eats the lamb chops.’ Fa Fa, as I called him then, thought this was all absolutely hilarious. My mother, a little tone deaf, as I recall, also joined in. His other aim was to develop a daughter with a ballet- straight back. Before dinner I had to stand with my spine touching the wall. Then I had to pronounce in a well-articulated voice, ‘How now, brown cow? G-r-r-azing in the g-r-r-een, g-r-r-een g-r-r-ass.” Eventually she lost her stammer.
In early 1948, not long after arriving in England to film The Passionate Friends for producer David Lean, Rains was surprised to receive an unsolicited script in the mail. The sender was Beatrix Thomson, with whom he had had no contact, direct or indirect, since their nightmarish divorce saga. She was producing the play, she wrote, and was appealing awkwardly to some imagined sense of British duty in an attempt to lure Rains back to the London stage. But he, happy to be an American, was unimpressed by his ex-wife's attempt to exploit his name in what he saw as a bid to recapture her lost status in the theatre. In an impersonal reply, Rains expressed his lack of interest and returned the script. He never heard from Beatrix again.
Based on the novel of the same title by H. G. Wells, The Passionate Friends would be released in America under the title One Woman's Story. (As Rains would later quip, Americans apparently didn't understand passion.) The plot revolved around an adulterous triangle between an international banker (Rains), his wife (Ann Todd), and her former and current flame (Trevor Howard).
The original director, Ronald Neame, clashed with Todd, a glacial blonde in the Hitchcock mold (she had, in fact, appeared in Hitchcock's The Paradine Case) who was involved in her own adulterous affair with Lean. Lean agreed to switch assignments with Neame and direct the film himself.
“David Lean liked Claude very much,” Neame recalled in 1999, “and not only liked him very much but thought he was a consummate actor. David was a wonderful director with actors who were secure. He made them better and better and better. Quite aside from his talent, Claude was very disciplined. He always knew his lines. He was always on time. He took direction beautifully. And he was a reliable, solid rock of Gibraltar in anybody's film.”
Rains also greatly admired Lean. “I can't say enough about the man as a director,” he said. “He's magnificent.” But the actor was concerned about his director's personal life, which seemed to be interfering with his work on the film. Lean, he also knew, was seeing a psychoanalyst.
“David,” Rains asked him at one point, “what's going on? What are you up to?”
“Claude, I'm going to get into awful trouble,” Lean said. He then told Rains about his ongoing affair with Ann Todd and the mess he had made of his marriage to actress Kay Walsh. Rains disliked Todd, who he felt had wasted everyone's time through her prima donna behavior with Neame over the script and Neame's direction. As Lean later told his biographer, Kevin Brownlow, “I said I was going to stop the picture. We couldn't go on spending money at that rate. We had commitments to Claude Rains, and we had permission to pay him in dollars. You don't realise how difficult that was. That had to be a top-level decision. He'd already been sitting there doing nothing for most of the time he'd been in the country.”
Rains had already admonished Todd privately about the need to show up on the set every morning, whether she was immediately needed or not. But as he observed the dynamics of her relation with Lean, his dislike of Todd only increased. Todd was a man-eating “machine,” in Rains's opinion. “By God, she took every cent from him. I don't think anyone could live happily with that woman. She took every damn thing away from him. He ended up with nothing except an old car. He was broke by the time he did The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
It is testimony to Rains's professionalism that his personal feelings about Todd didn't influence his performance with her. It was Lean, in fact, who convinced him to reconsider his interpretation of the pivotal scene in which his character discovers his wife's infidelity (she neglects to hide a pair of unused theatre tickets, giving away the fact that she has, of course, been somewhere other than the theatre.) Rains had prepared to play the scene as a wounded spouse, but Lean wanted to infuse the scene with a minor bit of deviltry, Rains's character subtly taking the upper hand in a game of cat and mouse. Rains, embarrassed at having misread the scene (“I'm a fool,” he told Lean), immediately returned to his hotel to prepare a new interpretation. The sequence was smoothly reshot the next day, and Lean considered it Rains's best scene in the film.
Lean recalled that “Claude always amused me because he carried timing to an almost absurd degree. You can almost put a Claude Rains scene to numbers: ‘Yes,’ pause of one, two, three, ‘I'm not so sure.’ Cross legs, two, three. ‘What do you think?’ And so on.” But Lean regarded timing as an essential technique of acting. “You ain't got timing, you ain't got anything.”
In Hollywood, Rains never used alcohol on the set, but the British film industry had different standards. “I knew he was a heavy drinker,” said Neame. “But I was, too. We might have been valiantly drunk, but nobody ever knew we were. I think there are people who can hold [their] drink a lot. And the British are pretty good at that, by the way. You Americans are hopeless. You don't have a bar in any of your film studios because you'd all get drunk after a couple of drinks. Whereas we'll go into the bar at lunchtime and drink three gin and tonics and discuss the scene that we were doing in the afternoon.”
At the beginning of filming, before Frances and Jennifer joined him for an extended stay at London's Connaught Hotel, Rains was housed temporarily at Great Fosters, a Tudor-era estate that at the time provided accommodations to an exclusive clientele. Late one night, he heard a loud commotion outside his room. Peering through his cracked door, he saw a ghostly figure in a nightshirt and nightcap, leaping and pirouetting up and down the hallway. When he made inquiries of the staff the next day, he learned that the nocturnal performance had been given by none other than legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Long disabled by schizophrenia, traveling with his wife and a male nurse, he was “dancing for the ghosts,” according to a hotel employee. Two years later, Nijinsky would join the ghosts permanently.
With The Passionate Friends completed, Rains and his family returned to the States, where he worked on two films in 1949, both for Paramount: Rope of Sand and Song of Surrender. A story of intrigue in the South African diamond trade, Rope of Sand also featured Burt Lancaster, Paul Henreid, and Peter Lorre. Rains plays a scoundrel and makes the most of a wealth of close-ups. Song of Surrender, by contrast, was a semi-musical directed by Mitchell Leisen. In this film, Rains played a New England museum curator whose much younger wife is being seduced by a New York lawyer. As he had done so reliably in the past, Rains did his best with problematic material.
In 1950, the Universal horror and fantasy classics of the 1930s and ’40s were theatrically redistributed by RealArt Pictures, and ultimately reached rural Pennsylvania. Rains's daughter, who was then around twelve, recalled a memorable night at the movies. One night, “My father said to me, ‘Get dressed, I'm taking you out.’ And I said, ‘Where are we going?’ He said, ‘Just get dressed and get into the car.’ We drove for eight miles to a little movie theater. It was winter, and he had a coat and his homburg hat and a scarf, which he wrapped around his face because it was cold. Actually, he looked a lot like the Invisible Man in the opening scene of the film. So we went up to the theater and he said to the cashier, ‘I'll have two tickets.’ And the man who was selling the tickets, who was also the owner of the theater, who was also the man who tore the tickets, who was also the man who showed you to your seats, immediately recognized the voice and said, ‘Oh no, Mr. Rains, I certainly couldn't let you pay.’ And my father said, ‘Absolutely not. I must pay for myself and my daughter.’ I don't remember who won this argument, but we did go in to see The Invisible Man, which was the first film that I had ever seen him in, even though you don't see him until the end.”
They sat in the back, and Rains proceeded to explain the technical details of the film to his daughter in a very audible—and recognizable—voice. “This is the part where they put straws in my nose, so that they could make a cast…” She went on: “He was explaining the film to me for the whole hour and eleven minutes. There were maybe thirty people in the theater, and they weren't watching the movie at all. They were all turned our way, watching my father talk about how they made this film.”
The school Jennifer attended was about ten miles from Stock Grange, and her father usually drove her, mornings and afternoons. En route, she would run lines with him from whatever script he was currently studying. Increasingly, they were television scripts. Many Hollywood actors boycotted the small screen in the early 1950s, sensing an industry threat, but Rains's close proximity to New York City, where most live television drama was then being produced, provided a natural connection. Jennifer disliked the debilitating car sickness she experienced while reading scripts along bumpy Pennsylvania back roads, but didn't complain. She was surprised to learn that her father didn't merely memorize his own lines. He memorized entire scripts. As a young boy, it had been his habit, as a prompter for Beerbohm Tree's company, to commit to memory every-body's dialog, and it was a technique he employed for the rest of his life.
Rains also continued to work in films, and in 1950 he did two for RKO, The White Tower and Where Danger Lives. The former, shot in Technicolor, was a mountain-climbing drama set in the Swiss alps; Rains played a heavy-drinking French stereotype, adrift in a cast of other international stereotypes, including a Brit (played by Cedric Hardwicke), a German (Lloyd Bridges), an American (Glenn Ford), and a Swiss local (Oscar Homolka). The film has the rare distinction of being one of the few that resulted in a bad notice for Rains. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times stated flatly, “Claude Rains, as a garrulous weakling, is something of a bore, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as another, is pathetic.” Rains's primary memory of the uncomfortable location shoot was enduring near-frostbite and receiving full-body brandy rubdowns from a nurse.
Where Danger Lives was a preposterous melodrama concocted to showcase RKO owner Howard Hughes's obsession with raven-haired actress Faith Domergue, then being groomed by the studio as “the new Jane Russell.” Rains took on the thankless role of Domergue's supposed father (actually her husband), who is suffocated by his psychopathic daughter/ wife in the opening sequence, but not before warning her suitor (Robert Mitchum) against marrying her. “You want her?” says Rains. “You can have her, only first I think you should know what you're getting.” What amounted to a cameo for Rains was puffed up in the advertising for the film, using Rains's name in an attempt to guarantee box office for a film that was thoroughly unworthy of his talents. Hughes and his staff wanted to secure a long-term commitment from Rains. But the actor instinctively knew that Hughes was only interested in him as a trophy acquisition, and he declined the offer.
Rains had long been considering a return to the theatre, but he was understandably apprehensive. In 1950, seventeen years had passed since he last acted in a play. After nearly two decades of “murmuring my way through the movies,” as he put it, Rains's technique had changed radically. Could he succeed in live performance?
When playwright-director Sidney Kingsley, who was preparing a stage adaptation of novelist Arthur Koestler's powerful indictment of totalitarianism, Darkness at Noon, approached Rains, the actor was surprised. Would he consider playing Rubashov, the idealistic Russian revolutionary turned upon and crushed by the communist party? The part would be prestigious, but exceedingly demanding, with Rains onstage for almost the entire play. The script was only partially finished, and the actor would be consulted for input as the adaptation progressed. Rains decided it was an extraordinary opportunity, offering him material far superior to his recent films. And although he would frequently tell interviewers he was “crazy” about film acting, his heart was dedicated to the immediacy and electricity of the stage.
What Rains didn't know (and would never know) is that he may have been Kingsley's second choice for the part. Edward G. Robinson, who had recently come under fire by the House Un-American Activities Committee and seemed like a natural for the role, was Kingsley's first choice. Robinson wasn't sure about whether to accept the offer. “I searched my soul,” he later wrote. “Could I do it? Or would it be too obvious for me to appear now in an anti-Communist play; would it be a kind of inverse confession, even though, God knows, I had nothing to confess?” Robinson agonized over the decision, but in the end, “I sent my regrets. Claude Rains, that beautiful actor, played it instead, and it was a hit.”
More than twenty years after Robinson's memoirs were published, Kingsley would bluntly call the actor's account “lies.” Kingsley also claimed that California communists “worked on Claude Rains, trying to frighten him, and telling him if he appeared in it it would ruin his career.” In any event, Rains had no idea of what a problematic personality he was bargaining with when he agreed to appear in Darkness at Noon.
Rains immersed himself in the project, and “practically memorized” Koestler's novel, consulting with Kingsley from Stock Grange by telephone and letter. They became “warm friends,” according to Kingsley. Difficulties arose, however, when rehearsals began. Rains realized that Kingsley's adaptation and direction were skewing the story toward red-scare theatrics at the expense of the book's ideological complexity. The novel is a scathing indictment of Stalinism, but it doesn't exactly repudiate the communist dream. Rains understood a subtle paradox when he saw one, but Kingsley maintained that “Claude had a double problem of hating direction and being fearful of coming back to the stage, needing direction every moment.”
The cast brought together old-school and new-school acting talent, Rains of course in the former category, with Kim Hunter (who had just appeared as Stella in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire) and Walter J. (later Jack) Palance representing the Actors Studio and its “Method.” Palance proved especially difficult in rehearsals, both for Kingsley and for Rains. In one confrontational scene that wasn't going very well, Rains finally told Palance, who played Rubashov's nemesis, Gletkin, “Just grab me by the collar and pull!” Palance complied vigorously, but when he tore some buttons off Rains's costume, he immediately burst into tears. Some of the new school–old school conflicts proved as dramatic as anything in the play. As actor Richard Seff, who played Prisoner 302, remembered, one day, when Kingsley asked Jack to turn left and face Claude, Jack replied that there was no “Jack” or “Claude” on stage, only their characters.
Sidney blinked, but he accepted it. “All right, Gletkin. Turn left
on that line and face Rubashov.”
“Why?” “Gletkin” asked.
“Because it looks good,” Sidney sent back.
“I can't turn left because it looks good,” Jack said quietly.
When Jack was quiet, he was at his most frightening.
“It's menacing. I want you to face him when you say that
line. It has no threat in it with your back to him.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said, and left the stage. Everyone winced.
This was 1950. Claude was stunned. Stunned, and insulted.
Rains thought Palance was “mad,” and demanded that he be replaced by the understudy, Brian Keith (then Robert Keith, Jr.). But Kingsley insisted that Palance's barely contained volatility, like a “coiled cobra,” was exactly what the part required. Palance apologized, took direction as given, and went on to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his performance.
Rains became increasingly irritated with Kingsley's attempts to micromanage and flatten his performance, but did his best to insulate the rest of the cast from his disputes with the director. According to Hunter, “He'd always put Sidney off, insisting that they discuss the point, or points, after rehearsal.” She didn't know the half of it. Frances Rains told her daughter that her husband ultimately refused to talk to Kingsley at all, and she personally had to act as a go-between for the director's increasingly obsessive communications, which Rains ignored. Hunter recalled that Kingsley relentlessly gave the whole cast (including Palance and Alexander Scourby) excruciatingly detailed notes after every performance, despite the play's triumphant opening and stunning reviews. Following a matinee performance a few weeks into the run, Kingsley went to Rains's dressing room. “What happened, Claude?” he asked. “You were quite good this afternoon.” As Hunter remembered Rains's response: “Well, I just went onstage and said to myself, ‘Fuck Sidney Kingsley.’” The director got the message; he never went backstage again during the show's run.
Darkness at Noon was played on an innovative, multilevel set designed by Frederick Fox, utilizing scrims that could represent the concrete walls of a prison when lit from the front and that dissolved into nothingness when lit from behind. The staging allowed for seamless transitions between the grim Moscow trials of 1937 and flashbacks to Rubashov's heady, forward-looking days as a revolutionary. The intense shifts in time and mood were taxing to Rains, who claimed to have given up drinking for the duration of the run to maintain his stamina. Given his long-term alcohol dependence, this assertion isn't quite believable, but the role was certainly a physical and emotional challenge. Rains's daughter recalled that he sequestered himself in his dressing room for hours before each performance.
“I find it quite a job,” he told The New Yorker. “The other Russians I've represented were complicated but they weren't in a class with this one. Today I'd probably regard the mad poet in Tolstoy's ‘The Living Corpse’ or Chlestakov in ‘The Inspector General’ as a fairly light assignment, although when I played them they seemed formidable. As a matter of fact I'm not too nervous about the prospect of playing a modern Christ, which Darryl Zanuck proposes to have me do this summer.” (The “Christ” role was to have been Klaatu, the alien emissary who rises from death to save the world in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. Rains's Broadway commitment made it impossible for him to accept the part, which went instead to Michael Rennie.)
Although Rains didn't socialize with the company outside the theatre, Richard Seff recalled him as being warm, generous, and surprisingly candid about his life and career. “Claude used to gather us around him before the play each night and regale us with tales of Caesar and Cleopatra, Vivien Leigh, Bette Davis, and his early days in England.” Rains took a particular shine to Seff and invited him for a weekend at Stock Grange. Showing him around the property, he confessed to the younger man, “Unfortunately, Dickie”—“He always called me that,” Seff recalled—“I have no talent other than acting. I can't write, direct, I certainly can't produce. I thought I could farm a little, but it turns out being a gentleman farmer isn't very fulfilling, so others do the farming and I just watch.” Seff registered his surprise. “I'm not complaining,” Rains replied, “just ruminating. When you reach a point in your career where you can afford to turn down things that don't interest you, and you reach a certain age, well—you don't work all that much. And frankly, I get bored. I'd love to have had a second, parallel career, something meaningful to do between pictures. I enjoy the stage, but it's tough.”
The five-month New York run of Darkness at Noon was indeed taxing on the actor, and, as Seff remembered, “it sort of dribbled to an end.”
This was an era when a hit musical might run a year at most, a hit play a season. But Claude's contract provided an out on July 1—he simply couldn't play this arduous role in the summer's heat. He'd spent the winter complaining about the weight of his sweater, yet the costume required it, for we were all in dank, freezing, damp Lubyanka Prison. Poor man ended each show wringing wet. His big concern was always his voice—one of his great assets, but after years in film, not as strong as it had once been. We were announced to close on June 23rd , but when the Drama Critics Prize and the Tonys came through, business leaped again and we were extended to June 30th. But on June 20th, a Wednesday, after two performances, Claude's voice simply disappeared.
Rains's understudy, character actor Will Kuluva, took over; but as Seff noted, Darkness at Noon “was created for a star, and audiences demanded one. Business collapsed, and we played the final four performances to half houses.”
Rains had riveted audiences, and his performance generated reverent admiration in the theatrical community. No less a star than Mary Martin, then playing nearby in South Pacific, was frequently seen, still in costume, backstage at the Alvin to watch bits of the show whenever she could steal time away from her musical. Darkness at Noon earned Rains all of the major New York theatre awards, including the Tony for best actor in a drama, the New York Drama Critics’ Annual Best Actor Poll, the Comedie Matinee Club's Bronze Medal, the Donaldson Award, and a Good Speech Medallion from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
One night near the end of the run, Rains noticed Edward G. Robinson sitting in the front row. Robinson had been chosen to play Rubashov on the road after Rains, exhausted by the production, had turned down the tour. He had never met Robinson during their Theatre Guild years—Rains was Robinson's company replacement—but he had seen the actor in the Guild's production of Franz Werfel's Juarez and Maximilian (the basis of Rains's film Juarez) and had admired Robinson's performance. They later met socially in Hollywood.
After the performance, Robinson came backstage. “I don't know what to say to you,” he said, taking a seat on a dressing room trunk. “I've never seen anything like it in the theatre.”
On New Year's Eve in 1951, Rains was at the farm when he got a call from Robinson in Chicago, where the play had opened the previous night. Robinson asked Rains for some technical advice on transitions and bridges, and then said, “The critics have made some ugly comparisons, and I say this in all sincerity.” Rains, a bit taken aback, called it “a humble confession.”
According to Robinson, Kingsley had turned against him after the first read-through. “It seemed to me he wanted me to give a carbon copy of the Claude Rains performance. I saw Rubashov differently than Rains; maybe I was bringing something of myself into it. Claude had not been born in Romania; Claude was not a Jew; Claude could not possibly understand the agony of a world turned against him—and that was an experience I was still going through.” Robinson played the part for a year on the road. Despite the plaudits both actors received, neither was invited to reprise their work when the play was produced for television. Instead, Kingsley chose Lee J. Cobb.
Rains would return to Broadway twice in the 1950s, first in a production of T. S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk in 1954, a dry, blank-verse comedy of manners involving mistaken paternity and maternity. The play received a lukewarm reception, although Rains loved to recount an exchange he had with a scene-stealing Ina Claire. “Why don't you just stand on your head?” he asked her once. “If I could, Mr. Rains,” she replied, “I would.”
In September 1954, after The Confidential Clerk closed and while Rains was contemplating another stage outing, New York producer Robert Whitehead invited him to the opening night performance of Shaw's Saint Joan in Wilmington, Delaware, at the beginning of a thirty-week, pre-Broadway tour. The star was Jean Arthur. Whitehead knew that Rains was an expert Shavian, and he also knew that Rains had also worked with Arthur. “I want you to tell me what you see,” he said to Rains. Wary of Arthur's volatility, Rains smelled trouble. His suspicions were confirmed during the performance he attended. “I didn't say much,” he remembered, but “it just wasn't Joan of Arc.” He declined Whitehead's invitation to visit backstage (“I didn't know how I'd be received”). Rains was appalled, but not surprised, when Arthur, claiming illness, walked out on the production several weeks later, without saying a word to the nearly two dozen cast and crew members she was throwing out of work. Throughout his career, Rains was infuriated by unprofessional conduct. He never crossed paths with Jean Arthur again.
Rains's next Broadway outing came two years later with another blank-verse play, The Night of the Auk, a futuristic drama set on the first spaceship to the moon and its problematic return to an earth ravaged by nuclear war. The playwright was Arch Oboler, best known for his radio suspense series Lights Out. He had also directed Rains years earlier in the film Strange Holiday, and Rains had performed in two of his radio plays. He liked Oboler and thought Auk “a damned good play,” but the critics were savage and the production closed in short order. According to TIME magazine, the cast, which, in addition to Rains, included Christopher Plummer, Wendell Corey, and Dick York, was “unhappily squandered on a pudding of a script—part scientific jargon, part Mermaid Tavern verse, part Madison Avenue prose—that sounded like cosmic advertising copy.”
One summer night in 1955, when Jennifer was seventeen, she awoke to the sounds of a terrifying argument between her parents. She had never heard them fight before. Words like “fuck” and “shit”—which they had never before uttered in her presence—now flew everywhere and seemed to stick in the walls. Her mother came to her room and told her she was leaving for good. Did Jennifer want to come with her?
Jennifer said no. She had too many friends nearby, and she loved Stock Grange. She was also about to go to college.
Neither of her parents revealed to her the specific reasons for their divorce, although Frances intimated to film historian Aljean Harmetz that the split was fueled in part by the twenty-year difference in their ages. She was more candid with her daughter. Frances had begun a relationship, at first platonic, with the owner of an upscale women's dress shop in a nearby town. The two would later marry.
Ronald Neame remembered being stunned on hearing of the split. “Whenever I came to New York, the first telephone call I made was always to Claude and to Frances. And it was always Frances that answered. And invariably if he was acting in the theatre, which a lot of the time he was, we would go and see the show. And then one day I telephoned and a housekeeper answered.” Frances called him back a few hours later. “And she said, ‘Well, Ronnie, I have something to tell you that you may not like very much, but Claude and I have parted.’”
Frances asked for Neame's reassurance that they could still remain friends. “I said, ‘Good gracious, Frances, I love Claude and I love you. And it's not going to change anything.’ But I was very surprised indeed. However, I think that Claude was probably a very difficult man to live with because he did have to be the center of attention all the time. He was very demanding of the people that were around him. And I think you would have to describe him as chauvinistic, perhaps in a quiet way. And I think Frances probably had quite a few moments in that marriage when she had to cover up. As perhaps we all do, of course.”
“This wasn't a family that talked about feelings much,” Jennifer remembered. “I don't know how many did at the time. My mother told me later that she had been unhappy with the marriage for at least five years, but didn't want to divorce before I was ready to go to college. I must have been an idiot not to suspect something. I was at a boarding school only fifteen miles away, but they would always alternate Sunday visits, never coming together.”
The ensuing summer was “nasty,” Jennifer recalled. On the day the divorce was final, her father, having been drinking, ran his treasured Bentley into a ditch, wrecking it. It was a miracle he lived. According to his neighbor Harrison Wetherill, “They found him near the car, too drunk to move. The car was on its top and on fire.” On his tax return for the year, he claimed the loss of a “1953 Bentley Convertible Coupe, purchased in 1953 [for $10,800]. Destroyed by fire in a country road accident—no other person or car involved—in August.” Insurance paid him $8,500 and, given the expenses of the divorce, he replaced the trophy vehicle with a much less expensive Chevrolet convertible.
But the drinking didn't stop. Rains began (or continued) a strange, sad affair with another alcoholic, the wife of a local farm owner, who personally dropped off his spouse at Stock Grange for alfresco assignations at the farm's private pond (the woman was supposedly there to go swimming). On one particularly unpleasant occasion, Rains asked his daughter to help his lover/drinking partner to be sick in the bathroom, an experience that thoroughly disgusted her. That fall, Jennifer enrolled at Bennington College. Two years later, the daughter of her father's mistress also enrolled—an awkward situation, given that Jennifer found it difficult to avoid her on a campus of just four hundred students.
Rains continued doing television. Given the circumstances of his life at the time, it is a bit surprising that he accepted a role of an alcoholic, unemployed actor for an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode called “The Cream of the Jest.” In it, the Rains character desperately pleads with a former producer for a second chance. Although not literally autobiographical, his lines underscore the basic insecurity experienced by many professional actors:
I'll take anything, even walk-ons. I've got to get back on the stage, don't you understand that? You know, sometimes when I sit in my room I go to the mirror and try to see who me is. And all the characters I've ever played pass in front of me. And I'm every one of them. But there's no real me, only the characters.…Then I go back and I sit, and I wait, I wait for somebody to call me back to life again. Somebody like you. I'm only real when I'm acting. The rest of the time I'm nothing. That's why I drink.
The Hitchcock episode also provided a rare filmed record of Rains delivering Shakespearean verse: the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth. (In 1952 he had appeared in, and audio recorded several selections from, the American Shakespeare Festival's gala An Evening with Will Shakespeare, with Eva Le Gallienne, Nina Foch, and others.)
Aside from his droll signature introductions, Hitchcock was not directly involved in the television series, except for a few episodes he directed (two with Rains), but he did supervise the series. One day, following Hitchcock's surgery for an umbilical hernia and other abdominal problems in the late 1950s, Rains recalled, he found himself on the same set with the director. “He had just had the operation. He was sitting there in that puffed, pouting pose. ‘Claude,’ he said, ‘they've taken my navel away.’ And he hiked up his shirt to show it.”
One of Rains's best appearances on the Hitchcock series—he appeared in a total of five episodes—was in the role of a murderous ventriloquist in an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story “And So Died Riabouchinska.” Bradbury himself was in awe of the performance, so much that he was at a loss for words when he met Rains on the set, completely forgetting to ask the actor his long-burning questions about The Invisible Man and other favorite films.
On January 10, 1957, Rains sold Stock Grange to Harrison Wetherill for $130,657. The divorce settlement allowed Frances to purchase and renovate a historic carriage house on picturesque Panama Street in Center City, Philadelphia (where she and her ex-husband would have a somewhat awkward reunion on the occasion of their daughter's marriage to Edward Brash). Rains reluctantly moved to a smaller West Chester property called Hawthorne House at 400 South Church Street. He had loved Stock Grange, he told the New York World Telegram and Sun in 1962. “When the play closed, or the movie was finished, I went right back to that farm,” he said. “Knowing it was there sustained me. But my doctor convinced me about five years ago that I didn't need all the burden of that land.”