by Mark Dery
Then, too, Gorey’s slighter offerings, such as the limerick about Little Zooks, don’t pretend to be anything but fribbles; their brief length and drawing-room scale are proportionate to their pleasures. They’re the literary equivalent of a bite of trifle; the very act of putting them onstage makes them feel overdone rather than understated, and understatement is the essence of Gorey’s droll wit. (“Edward is rather like chamber music,” says Clifford Ross. “You can’t turn him into a symphony.”)56
That understatement is the sum of his laconic narration, his characters’ flattened affect, and the oblique, sometimes hopelessly obscure nature of his absurdist (and absurdly erudite) humor. Which makes for more problems: actors like to act, and they like to make audiences react, whereas Gorey’s stories, even at their most amusing, are designed to elicit a small, wry smile—the face a cat makes when it’s licking feathers off its chops—rather than a belly laugh. Giving Gorey the musical-comedy treatment is a fraught proposition, like staging Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a figure-skating routine. (The opera director Peter Sellars puts his finger on the nub of the problem when he explains why Dracula didn’t feel very Gorey to him. Broadway is “all about ‘selling’ everything,” he says—“people coming right down to the middle stage and belting something. What I missed entirely in the Broadway shows was the mystery, the haunted quality, and the reserve and the secrecy, because Broadway is about showing it all.”)
Not that Gorey would have been fazed by any of these objections. “[Gorey Stories] was the only time I appreciated my own work, because it had nothing to do with me—somebody else did it,” he said. “The minute I heard things I’d written coming out of other people’s mouths, I absolutely adored it…”57
That, of course, is what makes a writer want to be a playwright. Gorey had succumbed to the romance of the footlights, and in his last decade or so he would spend most of his creative energies on plays, not books. Gorey Stories, meanwhile, “developed a kind of half-life on the amateur circuit,” as Gorey put it.58 Samuel French published the script, and the show has become, over time, a Halloween favorite.
* * *
Nineteen seventy-eight was memorable for Gorey in one other way: on October 11, Helen Dunham St. John Garvey Gorey died. She was eighty-six and had been living, for a year or so, in an assisted-living facility in Barnstable village, just down the road from the house on Millway where Gorey lived with his cousins when the City Ballet wasn’t performing. Built in 1880, the Harbor View Rest Home was a stately mansion, “quite grand,” as Skee Morton recalls it, “with big rooms, high ceilings, and marble fireplaces.”59 Gorey and his cousins referred to it, with predictable black humor, as “Hemlock Manor.”
As Skee remembers it, Ted had moved his mother to the Cape in the fall of ’76, when it had become obvious that she was too infirm to continue living alone in her Chicago apartment. He was dutiful in his visits to Hemlock Manor, and Skee dropped in now and then, but Ted’s aunt Isabel, Helen’s sister, rarely stopped by, despite living only a few minutes’ drive away. A lifetime of sibling rivalry between the two strong-willed women had taken its toll.
Like his aunt, Gorey had a charged relationship with his mother. “Distance enhanced their relationship” is Eleanor Garvey’s dry way of putting it. Says Skee, “They would talk on the phone…and I think that worked better than when she was actually there telling him what to do—‘Put on your boots,’ and things.” The devoted mother of a gifted only child, she could be nudgy and suffocatingly oversolicitous. Her letters to Ted at Harvard are full of don’t-forget-to-wear-your-rubbers reminders and promises of care packages: “I will get a batch of cookies off this weekend. Guess I told you I spent last one making fruitcakes, which are all bedded down waiting for the holidays.”d
Then again, caricaturing Helen Gorey as a smothering mother is too easy. For a good part of Gorey’s youth, she was a single parent supporting a child whose quirky brilliance and artistic mind she only half understood. On one of the rare occasions when Gorey spoke openly about his family, he said of his mother, “We were far closer than I really wished most of the time, and we fought a good deal right up until the time she died, at the age of 86. She was a very strong-minded lady.”60 In another conversation, he was even more pointed: “She had a stroke when she was about 80 and her entire character changed. All her hypocritical love for humanity vanished. Any parent-child relationship has its sides, you know. With Mother I was always getting carried away. I’d say, ‘Oh, Mother, let’s face it. You dislike me sometimes as much as I dislike you.’ ‘Oh, no, dear,’ she’d say. ‘I’ve always loved you.’”61 “But did she love your work?” the interviewer asks. Gorey chooses his words carefully: “She appreciated it. But, poor dear, she had become very sour toward me in the last five years of her life. She was, however, lovely to everyone else.”62
Skee confirmed that Helen “didn’t really understand [Ted’s] work all that well,” noting, “I don’t think she was terribly artistic.” True enough: Helen Gorey always seemed a bit baffled by her eccentric artist son. “I still don’t know where he gets his ideas,” she told an interviewer. “They seem to just sprout out of his head. He says, ‘I get an idea and I put it down and I don’t know if it means anything or not.’ I think it does, but I don’t know and he doesn’t know.” She laughed. “But then, Ted always did puzzle me.”63
Still, it’s significant that Gorey’s first anthology, a book he must’ve known would send up a bigger flare than anything he’d done to date, was dedicated, “For my mother.”
a As far as we know, that is.
b The Martin Beck, on West 45th Street, is now the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.
c The friend donated it, after Gorey’s death, to the Edward Gorey House. Located in Gorey’s former home in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, the Gorey House showcases exhibitions devoted to the artist and his work. It opened in 2002.
d Helen’s insistence on sending her son fruitcakes would explain Gorey’s imperishable aversion to the Christmas confection. He insisted there was only one fruitcake in existence, endlessly regifted around the world. One of his Christmas cards depicts a festive scene: a Victorian family, bundled up against the cold, disposing of unwanted fruitcakes—is there any other kind?—by heaving them into a hole in the ice. “My mother used to spend entire summers making fruitcake,” he said. “She wrapped them in brandied cloth. I always gave them away. I could never bear to say, ‘Mother, I hate fruitcake.’” (See Joseph P. Kahn, “It Was a Dark and Gorey Night,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1998, C4.) Of course, being Gorey, he was always happy to upend expectations at the drop of a hat. “Actually, someone gave me one a few years ago,” he admitted after his mother was gone. “I ate it. It wasn’t bad.”
Chapter 13
Mystery!
1979–85
IN 1979, WGBH, THE BOSTON affiliate of PBS, approached Gorey about creating animated title sequences for the soon-to-be-launched Mystery!, a Masterpiece Theatre spin-off devoted to British mysteries and crime dramas.
Herb Schmertz, the head of PR at Masterpiece’s corporate underwriter, Mobil Oil, had an ear cocked to the cultural buzz. Gorey’s Dracula fame preceded him, and Schmertz thought his work would be perfect for the new show’s opening titles and closing credits. It had just the right air of Agatha Christie whodunit and gothic spookiness. Joan Wilson, the show’s producer, needed little persuading. And she knew just the man to turn Gorey’s distinctive black-and-white imagery into animated sequences: Derek Lamb, a British animator known for his innovative work with the National Film Board of Canada.
All that remained was to beard Gorey in his den, or, rather, in Wilson’s office at WGBH. Lamb, a fervent fan of Gorey’s work, was “morbidly curious” to meet the man, he later confessed, having heard a rumor that Gorey had two left hands.1 (Seriously.) He broke the ice by screening his award-winning short Every Child, an avant-pop cartoon about a cherubic foundling whom no one wants. “I like it” was Gorey’s verdict. “It’s so sinister.” Then
they got down to business. Gorey had prepared a detailed script for the title sequence, which Lamb remembered as “an intriguing concept using a Victorian children’s puppet theater.”
Unfortunately, its running time would have been somewhere around twenty minutes—a smidge overlong for an introduction that was supposed to last thirty seconds, tops. “They said it would last too long,” said Gorey. “I said, ‘Not if you make it go fast enough. If you just zip right around, it would probably take two minutes.’ But no, it would take hours. I thought, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’”2 There was “some serious pouting,” as Lamb remembered it, “and a lot of staring out the window.”3 Seven hours and several meals later, it was agreed that Lamb and his Montreal-based team of animators would pore over Gorey’s books and rough out a storyboard, based on selected stories, that would fit within the allotted time. With luck, it would meet with Gorey’s approval.
Janet Perlman, Lamb’s wife at the time and his partner in their animation company, Lamb-Perlman Productions, recalls him combing through the first two Amphigoreys, Xeroxing images that caught his eye, then cutting them out and arranging them on a table, moving this scene here and that one there to create a free-associated narrative flow. “They’re disconnected images,” yet “closely related enough that they don’t surprise you when one image goes to something completely different afterwards,” notes Eugene Fedorenko, one of the animators who worked on the Mystery! titles.
Gorey gave the storyboard his begrudging go-ahead and agreed to draw a few defining images, one for each of the scenes, that would serve as reference points for the animators. Lamb, Fedorenko, and Rose Newlove, another member of the team, traced Gorey’s “key frames,” as they’re known in the trade, then produced the drawings, twelve for each second of movement, that created the transitions between Gorey’s images, making the storyboard’s static tableaux come alive.
Fedorenko recalls the difficulties of animating Gorey’s bell-jar world. Rich in textures and dense with scene-setting details, a Gorey drawing isn’t “an image that you can hold up for two seconds and then switch to another one,” he points out. “They last and last and last.” Gorey’s dizzily intricate patterns had to be confined to the backgrounds; dressing a character in one of his richly detailed outfits would have sentenced the animators, at twelve drawings per second, to the cross-hatching treadmill. (These, remember, were the days of hand-drawn animation.) To further complicate matters, Gorey’s busiest patterns had to be avoided, since they produced a moiré effect on the low-resolution video of the day.
Perlman was struck by the virtuosity of Gorey’s draftsmanship. In an effort to capture his style as exactly as possible, she used a loupe to study his drawings and worked at his scale, using a crow-quill dip pen similar to the one he used. Noting his precise, accurate rendering of “the proportions of the urns, of the gravestones, of the finials,” she describes Gorey as a careful observer who never cut corners. “His patience is unbelievable. There was no easy thing about all of that cross-hatching; it was very fine work, and takes a long time to do.”
Her observations help explain why Hollywood hasn’t translated Gorey’s work into the animation medium. Even the experimental animators who pop up in animation festivals seem to have judged the challenge of putting Gorey on the screen too daunting. More’s the pity, since he once told an interviewer who asked him if he had any interest in animated versions of his books, “I would love to do full-length movies, but nobody’s ever asked me, so what the heck, you know.”4
When Mystery! debuted on February 5, 1980, viewers were entranced by the opening, a dreamlike procession of playfully sinister Gorey vignettes: a widow in Victorian mourning dress, celebrating her husband’s demise with a glass of wine, graveside; bowler-hatted sleuths shadowing a culprit, flashlights in hand; a swooning ingenue in an evening gown; a cocktail party of shifty-eyed suspects pretending not to notice the stiff sinking into the lake. The French-Canadian composer Normand Roger’s slinky minor-mode tango, inspired by the rhythm of the tiptoeing sleuths, is the glue that holds everything together. Roger’s wife at the time provided the ingenue’s melodramatic moan.
Gorey was predictably saturnine. “Derek Lamb was responsible for the whole thing,” he groused.5 Still, the Mystery! titles spread his name far beyond the Broadway theatergoers who’d seen Dracula. Generations succumbed to the dark drollery of the animated sequences,6 and advertising campaigns featuring Gorey graphics and tie-in merchandise such as the Mystery! sarcophagus box, a coffin-shaped pencil case with a Gorey skeleton embossed on its lid, spread the Gorey gospel while promoting the series. So, too, did the black-and-white Dracula-style sets, thick with Gorey cross-hatching, used in the early years of the series. When Vincent Price, and subsequently Diana Rigg, introduced each evening’s episode, they stood before a backdrop whose writhing wallpaper and hand-drawn decor were unmistakably Goreyesque. (Price called the set “Gorey Manor.”)
And then there were the “Fantods,” as WGBH cleverly dubbed them, rolled out in Mystery!’s third season—two- or three-minute dramatic readings of Gorey stories, accompanied by still images from his books, that filled out the hour at the end of a show. (British programs tended to run short by American standards.) Mystery! reached far into the hinterlands, where the morbid humor and arch sensibility of the Fantods sometimes furrowed the brows of Babbitts. From time to time, WGBH and Mobil received letters from viewers concerned about the Fraying of Our Moral Fabric, so alarmingly evidenced by Gorey’s stories. An outraged member of the viewing audience in Bellaire, Texas, deplored the Fantods as “satanic,” especially the one that made light of the “gruesome deaths” of little children (The Gashlycrumb Tinies); PBS should cease airing the “evil cartoons” posthaste!7 A viewer in Santa Barbara was no less appalled by the Tinies, decrying the segment as “the most sick presentation I have ever seen on television.” And then there was the dyspeptic Masterpiece fan in Andover, Massachusetts, who thought Gorey was a “ghoul” and that PBS was hell-bent on “spreading his spores.” The network owed the affronted millions out in Televisionland “some kind of explanation, somewhere,” for this “savagely tasteless” fare.
Gorey, predictably, was delighted by the Fantods. Of all the aspects of the show that bore his stamp, they alone met with his unreserved approval.
* * *
His affair with the theater continued to seduce him away from the writing desk. In 1980, he designed sets for an irreverent postmodern take on Don Giovanni that premiered in Manchester, New Hampshire, in September of that year as part of the festival known as Monadnock Music. The director was a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind named Peter Sellars. In decades to come, he would earn a reputation as opera’s enfant terrible, outraging the old guard with works like Nixon in China, set to a chugging minimalist score by John Adams.
All these years later, Sellars retains vivid impressions of his afternoon at the house on Millway, brainstorming set designs with Gorey. “While I proposed some rather wild things to do with the material, Ted’s answer was to create sets that were pure Palladio”—he laughs—“just sheer balance and clarity and absolutely nothing wild-eyed.” (Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance architect, championed a neoclassical aesthetic of clarity and symmetry. His ideas experienced a resurgence in the eighteenth century, giving rise to the style known as Palladianism.) Mostly white, with what Sellars calls “slightly etched, slightly fraught” line drawings of eighteenth-century architectural elements, Gorey’s flats were suspended against a pitch-dark background, their archways opening onto blackness. Sellars reads his juxtaposition of primal darkness and elegant restraint as a metaphor for the role of repression in Gorey’s work. “What we do as artists is affirm the presence of the secrets,” he says.
In ’81, Gorey designed the drop curtains for the Royal Ballet’s revival, at Covent Garden, of The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody), a comic ballet by Jerome Robbins. One depicts a cartoonish piano scuttling along on prehensile claw feet, its keyboard looking like a toothy
maw; in another, the piano is dead, flat on its back, stiff-legged. Broken black umbrellas dance like bats in the gray sky, lashed by gusting winds. The New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg had done curtains for an earlier version of the ballet, but the New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay judged Gorey’s superior to Steinberg’s “in drawing, in fantasy, and in wit.”8
Robbins, it turns out, had met Gorey back in the City Center days and had been much amused by his eccentricities. He described the fantastic apparition in a letter to Tanaquil Le Clercq:
At first all you can see of him is his beard and mustache, then you start to see his eyes and teeth and some of his expressions; then you notice all the rings he wears and finally the fact that although he wears a rather elegant fur-lined coat his feet are shod in worn out sneakers. As an added fillip you perceive that the skin between his socks and the cuffs of his pants is very white and crowded with black and blue marks. Dear Abby what do you think?9
Gorey’s involvement with the theater continued in ’82, when he illustrated Harcourt’s new edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Written by T. S. Eliot to amuse his godchildren, it’s a lighthearted romp in verse through the secret world of felines. Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on Eliot’s book, had premiered in London’s West End the year before and would be coming to Broadway in ’82. “We expect sales to soar once the play is running,” Harcourt’s marketing director told the New York Times.10
