Only sixteen years later, accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Hamlet, when Laurence Olivier thought it would be great good fun to repeat Langford’s stunt, he doffed his top hat, revealed the same Tiny Johnson – and was met by the stunned silence of a disapproving audience so painfully refined and classy that every last one of them was wearing clean underwear. Olivier stood in utter mortification, his smile as frozen as a bananasicle. When Tiny Johnson lit a sparkler and began to wave it and an American flag, in what must have seemed, in the planning, to be a stroke of show-business genius, the offended audience griped in shock, drawing in so much air at the same time that ushers, standing in the aisles, came dangerously close to imploding in the brief ensuing vacuum. That the Queen of England, even many years later, could overlook this shameful spectacle and bestow a knighthood on Olivier is incontestable proof of the resiliency and the compassion of the British monarchy – or proof, perhaps, of the sadly short memory capacity that has resulted from the inbreeding of all European royalty over the centuries.
I am happy to tell you that Langford Crispin – a kind and most considerate man who helped many orphans and deserved no one’s scorn – was not humiliated by Olivier’s awards-show performance, because Crispin had by then been dead many years. I can also assure you that dear Langford was not subjected to the discomfort of having to spin in his grave, because after his emulsified body was scraped off the ceiling of the library in his lovely Beverly Hills mansion, his remains were not in suitable condition to be shaped into a suit for viewing at his funeral, and the several jars of his mortal substance were at once cremated. It is possible, I suppose, that in response to Olivier’s capering at the Academy Awards show, Langford’s ashes whirled in the urn where they were stored, but that is a far more pleasant image than a decaying carcass tumbling around and around among worms and filth and rotten grave cloth inside a termite-riddled coffin.
Where was I?
Oh, yes. Langford triumphantly accepted the Academy Award for his role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and thereafter his career fell as hard and fast as the bludgeoned body of a troublesome neighbor dropped into an abandoned well after midnight. Not, I hasten to add, that I would know anything about the disappearance of my neighbor or anyone else’s, or about the location of any abandoned well, or about the relative speed and force of impact of a falling body that has been thoroughly bludgeoned. I am speaking, of course, entirely metaphorically, with the free and supple imagination of a novelist.
Although, in 1933, Charles Laughton won the Academy Award for Best Actor in The Private Life of Henry the VIII, Langford was not merely criticized for his work in the same picture but loudly reviled by people who should have known better. His decision to play Lord Havingstoke as a mincing, one-armed, twelve-toed tyrant in a funny hat and elfin shoes was, in retrospect, not a proper interpretation of the role. But nothing in his performance warranted food being thrown at him by members of the film community when he went to dine at the Polo Lounge, nor the attempts of paring valets to run him down with his own vehicle.
In 1934, when It Happened One Night swept all the major awards -Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay -Langford Crispin was not present to share in the glory, because though he was not yet smeared in a disgusting emulsification across the ceiling of his library, his role in the film had been left on the cutting-room floor. Not by accident, you understand, but by the intent of the producer and director. Langford had played Clark Gable’s deranged brother, Norman Bates, who at one point hacks to death Claudette Colbert and eats her liver with some fava beans and a good Chianti. Although this was a brilliant performance and far ahead of its time, the studio ultimately decided that the entire character of Norman Bates was out of place in a light comedy meant to lift the spirits of a Depression-era audience, and Langford was eliminated in the final cut.