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DAYTON

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The article about the Dayton Gay Community Center, originally scheduled for this month, will appear in next month's issue of High Gear.

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STARRING

OCTOBER 1976

CHARLES LAUGHTON

by George Brown

CHARLES LAUGHTON: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY by Charles Higham with introduction by Elsa Lanchester. 239 pages Doubleday & Company, Inc. $8.95.

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He was an actor of the first magnitude who won plaudits on both stage and screen, winning the Academy Award of 1933 for best actor in the title role of "The Private Life of Henry VIII." He appeared in a succession of films in which he left his individual stamp, for as all great actors and stars, he was an original. Thanks to film and to television, generations coming after his death in December of 1962 are able to see his gallery of portrayals, some of them in addition to Henry VIII being Captain Bligh in "Mutiny on the Bounty," the title role in "Rembrandt," the title role in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and roles in "They Knew What They Wanted," "The Big Clock," "O. Henry's Full House," "Hobson's Choice," "Witness for the Prosecution," and "Advise and Consent."

Thirteen years after Charles Laughton's death his wife Elsa Lanchester and his biographer Charles Higham have brought Laughton out of the closet and presented his life as it really was, including its homosexual foundation. CHARLES LAUGHTON: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY lives up to its title in creating the intimate picture of the fascinating actor, but a reader looking for salacious details will not find them because much of Laughton's sexual activity still remains private. In order to understand a person we must analyze him in. the context of his time and place, and much automatically should be understood about Charles Laughton when we consider that he was born to middleclass parents in Yorkshire, England, in 1899, during the last years of Queen Victoria's reign. One of the weaknesses of this perceptive biography is the paucity of material about Laughton's formative years, but Higham shows Charles the child and teenager as the square peg in the round hole. He enjoyed flowers and other sensitive things that stereotyped males weren't supposed to; and being fat and awkward, he was the butt of jokes at school. Laughton never liked his obese body, and it is impressive that despite his physical appearance and lack of good looks that he was able to become the prominent actor that he was; many of the better roles certainly went to handsome men who sometimes were much less talented.

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Being in the time and the place he was, Laughton found it difficult to cope with his homosexuality, and he did what most homosexuals did then; he went underground. But he went deeper underground than many, and he went alone. He was a young man during the bohemian and permissive Twenties, and perhaps this enabled him to express himself more freely than if he had been born a generation earlier, but the times, at least for Charles Laughton, dictated that he operate in solo secret. Technically he must have been a bisexual, at least in his late youth, because he and Elsa Lanchester were married in 1929. It wasn't until a year or so later that Elsa discovered his exact sexual nature when one of Laughton's male pickups returned to harass him. Elsa recovered from her shock, and the marriage endured, but it underwent a change. Gradually, but early, sexual relations between the couple tapered to zero, and Elsa began to look to other men for sexual fulfillment. During the remainder of their marriage they went their separate ways sexually, and this did create a strain on their .relationship; but their intellectual and emotional bond was so great that they remained together until Laughton's death. Elsa asked the astute Higham to write this biography on the theory that if they didn't tell the story, someone else would. Higham, with the aid of Elsa and her files, and from contact with people who knew Laughton, writes in elegant and clear prose, giving a sympathetic but convincingly objective analysis

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of Laughton.

During his early adult days Laughton's sexual relationships with other males were "brief and futile." Then masseurs came into his life, to be replaced by a succession of at least three young and handsome lovers; and it appears that fidelity wasn't always part of Laughton's pattern. Higham, perhaps too generously, refers to at least two of these affairs as Socratic in nature. Toward the end of his life Laughton decided that he no longer wanted to be aloof from the society of his own kind, but Higham does not reveal exactly how he sought out that society. By Laughton's statement we are to assume that although he had sexual relations with young men throughout most of his life, he did not move in a gay society, even a clandestine one. It wast toward the end of his life, though, that Laughton with Christopher Isherwood, now a self-proclaimed gay although he wasn't then, worked on a dramatic version of the life of Socrates as revealed in Plato's Dialogues. It is regrettable that the project never materialized because Laughton's and Isherwood's talents might have created an artistic presentation that would have contributed to the homophile movement.

This biography, however, as a biography should, emphasizes Laughton the artist rather than dwelling on his sex life. Higham details Laughton's life from his beginnings on the London stage through his career in British and Hollywood films. .The biographer comments on many of the celebrities Laughton worked with, and it is interesting