CHARLES LAUGHTON and ELSA LANCHESTER

“Come in, come in. Lovely to see you. Lovely.”

Elsa Lanchester, widow of the actor Charles Laughton, greeted me at the door of the home in Beverly Hills the two had shared during their thirty-five-year marriage. Everything I’d hoped and expected her to be, she was. Wildly eccentric, extremely bright, and wonderfully saucy.

It was the early 1970s. After over a decade of work on Off-Broadway stages in New York and regional theatres around the country, I had begun my movie career with the films Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Twelve Chairs and I was in L.A. looking to find more work in them.

Miss Lanchester agreed to see me because it had been communicated to her by a mutual friend that I was fascinated with her husband and his approach to film acting. Mr. Laughton had passed away in 1962.

“First tea, I think,” she said, and we settled down in the living room of a house I remember only as English Tudor and suitably shabby. The Brits don’t like anything to look new. Furniture must have rips in the upholstery, exposed stuffing, paintings hung crooked, crockery unmatched and properly chipped. The feeling being, I suppose, one is above caring; however self-consciously tattered it appears.

Miss Lanchester settled comfortably onto the couch and talked animatedly about their life in California, her passionate love of gardens, her husband’s devotion to the sun, their animals, and the good life his success afforded them. “England is our home, of course,” she said, “but life here, as it is for so many of our expats, is divine. Particularly as one gets older and the bones begin to creak. And, of course darling, there are all the delicious perks Hollywood has to offer. Charles adored them all and, frankly, so do I. Our tiny island could never afford us this sort of life. So many of our friends are here, although I must say Charles preferred not to be part of the English contingent. He was, by nature, an extremely solitary man and cared not to heavily associate with our compatriots. But, including ourselves, dear, I can tell you: nobody corrupts quicker than a Brit.”

Charles Laughton was, to my mind, an extraordinary actor. His particular brand of English hauteur irritated many of his own countrymen, I think, more than the Americans. His performances as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty are superb. All the style, technique, and precision of the British actor, but with an ingredient rare in that breed: soul!

My personal favorite is his performance in Witness for the Prosecution. Aided and abetted by his wife, it is consummate stage/screen acting—serving both mediums beautifully.

Miss Lanchester spoke of him with love and affection, talking of his deeply sensitive nature, bouts of depression and insecurity.

“I can’t do this one. I can’t. Must get out of it,” was his usual clarion call of alarm after he agreed to be in a picture. Stories of his threatening to back out of or shut down productions because he couldn’t “find his character” were a part of his legend. He eventually showed up to show off and his rather distant and paranoid behavior often amused his fellow workers. Peter Ustinov once said of him:

“There was Charles, lurking about the set, hoping to be offended.”

“Charles was devastated by bad notices,” Miss Lanchester said. “He would take to his bed in agony, reading them again and again. Finally, he devised a method for exorcising them from his soul. He taught a Shakespeare class here at the house in his studio and he would gather the notices and perform them for his students. If a critic said, ‘Mr. Laughton is pompous,’ he would deliver the word with ten times the venom it engendered. He’d act the review with tremendous power and vitriol, exhausting himself and then burn it in a bucket. It was very entertaining.”

We ended a tour of the house in Mr. Laughton’s bedroom, not very bright, also suitably tattered, with books by the hundreds. Then on to her room.

“Come here to the window,” she said. “Look out. What do you see?”

“Your swimming pool.”

“Yes. Can you see all four corners?”

“No. Only three.”

“Yes! Only three. There is an area of the pool that cannot be seen from any window of the house. And had you visited when Charles was alive, that is the area in which he would have taken you, suggested you swim in the nude, and then seduced you. That’s where he took the beautiful boys. He was homosexual, you know.”

“I’m not that easily seduced,” I said.

“Don’t be too certain, dear boy. Charles could be very persuasive.”