Over the years, the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge has hosted a variety of events with guests ranging from authors, to politicians, to movie stars. The latter should come as no surprise. Just last September actor Keir Dullea visited the Pickwick Theatre for a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But few are aware that one of the greatest actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age appeared right here in Park Ridge in the early 1950s.
The English stage and film actor, Charles Laughton (1899-1962), was recognized as one of the most distinguished actors of his profession, a term used so often that Charlie, as he preferred to be called, wanted to be distinguished for something else! He was the husband of actress Elsa Lanchester. Together they lived in a Mediterranean-style home on the Pacific Palisades bluffs of California, which overlooked the ocean.
No picturesque vistas greeted Charles Laughton when he arrived in the Midwest. Tuesday, January 22, 1952, was a cloudy, windy day during a typical Chicago winter. Laughton was in town to perform his “one-man act” at the Pickwick Theatre. At this point in his career, Charles Laughton had divided his time between personal appearances, such as the one in Park Ridge, and his work in a New York play, George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, which he was then directing and playing in with Agnes Moorehead and Charles Boyer.
Charles Laughton’s live performance tour was scheduled nationally, and his one-day appearance at the Pickwick would be his only stop in the area. The event was sponsored by the Women’s Circle of Community Church of Park Ridge. Tickets were just $2 and were being sold at Scharringhausen’s Drug Store, Avenue Gift Shop, Fenders Bootery, Dean’s Park Ridge Stationers, and the Community Church office. There were also locations in Des Plaines and Edison Park that offered limited tickets.
On that night, Laughton performed dramatic readings, everything from James Thurber to the Holy Bible– with a very apropos selection from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers added for the occasion. (Laughton had played Samuel Pickwick in Mr. Pickwick at the Theatre Royal in London in 1928.) It was said that Laughton knew his material by heart and only used the books he carried out on stage as “props.” This was seemingly confirmed at a prior performance in which he held a copy of a Charles Dickens book upside down.
At the Park Ridge show, he read to a thoroughly captivated audience. There was intensity and warmth in the presentation. Even though the temperature outside had dropped below 20 degrees, the weather did not affect attendance. The Pickwick Theatre was filled to capacity, and in 1952, the auditorium had many more seats than are currently available, somewhere in the vicinity of 1400.
Park Ridge Herald, January 24, 1952.
It is no wonder that the Park Ridge community came out to witness this theatre magic. Charles Laughton was famously known for his roles in such films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), in which he played the blustery Captain Bligh opposite Clark Gable, the comedy Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), the definitive version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and the courtroom drama Witness For the Prosecution (1957). Laughton, a student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, had made his stage debut in 1926. He later arrived on the New York theatre scene in 1931.
His Hollywood film debut came in 1932 when he appeared opposite Boris Karloff in director James Whale’s The Old Dark House. His major breakthrough in film, however, came in 1933 when he starred in The Private Life of Henry VIII. It was a performance that would earn him his only Academy Award for Best Actor. (He would later be nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty and Witness For the Prosecution.) Laughton also directed one film now critically praised as one of the greatest of the 1950s: The Night of the Hunter (1955).
But unlike stage or film, his performance at the Pickwick was unique. It was literally a one-man show, and that’s how Charles Laughton preferred it. For Laughton, it gave him the opportunity to play all the parts and become dozens of characters. Beyond his ability to deliver lines with dramatic effect, he proved to be a master storyteller who knew how to keep an audience engaged. He was once asked by a reporter how he chose his program. “I don’t know,” Laughton replied. “I may be on stage all of ten minutes before I ‘dig’ the spirit of the audience. Sometimes they’re in a mood for the ‘toughness of Caesar’; sometimes for the delicacy of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; sometimes for the lusty story of ‘David and Goliath’; sometimes for the solemnity of the ‘Psalms’; sometimes for one of Dickens’s Christmas stories, sometimes for one of his melodramatic passages; always for James Thurber, and old Aesop and stories and poems of romance never fail.”
There was an unpredictability about these performances. Even Laughton himself didn’t know what he might do on stage. A critic at the time had described Laughton’s readings as “a combination of the Sunday comics, an act of ‘Julius Caesar,’ a Bible service, a roller coaster ride, and a trip through the Looking Glass.” For his Pickwick appearance, which lasted two hours, Laughton closed the evening with a reading of Abraham Lincoln’s The Gettysburg Address. (This was one of those selections he had performed hundreds of times all over the country. A little over two months later he would recite an unrehearsed version of it on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” with Bud Abbott & Lou Costello.)
Charles Laughton may very well be the finest actor to ever appear on the stage at the Pickwick Theatre, or in Park Ridge for that matter. Nearly seventy years have passed since that January night. The old stage is covered now behind a new screen, and the memories of that show have long been forgotten, but if by chance there is someone out there who had been in attendance and spent “An Evening with Charles Laughton,” please contact us at the Park Ridge Public Library. We would love to have you share those memories. Perhaps one day the spirit of Charles Laughton will manifest once again at the Pickwick. How about a screening of Mutiny on the Bounty at the Pickwick Theatre Classic Film Series?
A special thanks to Larry in Adult Services (Reference) at the Park Ridge Public Library for his research in finding articles related to Mr. Laughton’s appearance at the Pickwick Theatre.
From a 1950 tour…
