by Dale Bailey
They were there.
I resisted the impulse to sit down and watch them through again immediately. Instead, I breakfasted standing in front of the open refrigerator, eating drunken noodles straight out of the box. After a shower, I felt almost human again. Human enough anyway to sit through the first fifteen minutes of Ghoul, to see if I could pick up anything I’d missed the first two times around. This was futile. There aren’t many nuances in an Ed Wood film. What you see is what you get. So I rewound the tape, ejected it, loaded it back into its box—and then, seized by some access of anxiety or paranoia, hid it away behind an old blanket on the upper shelf in Denny’s closet. Grabbing the video of Something’s Got to Give, I went looking for the manager in the old motel office.
She stood behind the counter when she saw me come in. She wanted to know how I was doing, if I was making any progress on Denny’s apartment. I lied on both counts, held up the video, said, “Do you have any idea where Dimension Video is?”
She pondered that, said the word Dimension aloud, as if that would help her remember. At last, uncertainly, she said, “I don’t know about Dimension. There’s a Video Hut a block over, by the laundromat.”
A Video Hut was useless to me, of course. I asked to see her phone book. Sitting on a hard plastic chair in the lobby, I checked it and checked it again, white pages and yellow pages, under both movie rental and video rental. Nothing, nothing, and nothing. If Dimension Video existed, it wasn’t trying very hard to get the word out. I sighed and handed the book back across the counter.
“You find what you’re looking for?”
The answer was no, in senses both literal and existential. I took a chance on the Video Hut. Maybe they’d bought the stock of a defunct store.
“I don’t think so,” the ponytailed kid behind the counter said. He squinted at the label on the box, then handed it back to me. “Sorry I can’t help. Maybe you should talk to the lady owns the place. Lou. I could take a message.”
“I’ll check back another time.”
“Your call,” he said. “Have a good day.”
I promised that I would try.
It was a fruitless endeavor, though. I dropped the video off at the apartment, climbed into the Cavalier, and spent the rest of the day touring L.A. I visited Lugosi’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. Had he lived to see it, Lugosi would have been thrilled at this affirmation of his achievements. But Hollywood took him to its bosom too late. He died mostly forgotten in a small apartment on Harold Way—the last stop on my swing through the city. I stood outside in the cool California evening, gazing at that apartment for a long time. I’d already tracked down Lugosi’s other homes, following the ascension of his star from the Ambassador Hotel to his mansion on Outpost Drive, where he lived at the apex of his fame in the mid-30s, and through its long decline in a variety of ever smaller accommodations during the ’40s and ’50s. But the Harold Way location struck me most powerfully. How could a man who had once commanded the adoration of millions wind up in such straitened circumstances, I wondered, and as I stood there in the blue twilight, watching the streetlights come on one by one to shed their soft refulgence, it seemed to me that the air filled with the inconsolable longing and desire of a city full of disappointed dreamers.
* * *
Denny’s screenplay was no biopic, because the Bela Lugosi it depicted never existed.
Bela Lugosi died in August 1956.
He did not shoot a film called The Ghoul Goes West in the spring of 1957.
He died clean. Despite all his faults, despite a failed career, despite his manifest deficits as a father and a husband, despite his despair, he never relapsed, and part of me despised Denny for depriving Lugosi of the one battle he had in reality won. Perhaps the first star to submit himself—publicly—to drug treatment, Lugosi left the hospital a changed man.
The Lugosi in Denny’s screenplay did not die in ’56. The Lugosi in Denny’s screenplay relapsed when Hope Lininger finally reached the limit of her endurance and abandoned him—which also never happened. In Denny’s screenplay, Lugosi, desperate for a fix and no longer able to find a doctor who would cooperate, turned to Tor Johnson. The Super Swedish Angel, who suffered from bad knees after his years in the ring, had no trouble getting a prescription. But he was a tormented man. Out of dog-like devotion, he procured Lugosi’s drugs; out of love, he begged Lugosi not to use them. Lugosi did, of course, and by the time The Ghoul Goes West went before the cameras, he was dosing himself regularly, sneaking away during breaks on the set to shoot up in the run-down studio’s lavatory—a filthy closet with a hollow-core door and a broken privacy lock.
It was in that lavatory that one of the key turning points in the screenplay occurred—a brief scene, but an important one: Lugosi is fumbling with a syringe when Gene Autry knocks at the door, saying, “Hey, is anyone in here?” Bela, startled, drops the loaded needle. It fetches up under the sink.
“If it will please you,” Bela says, “I will be just one min—”
But the Singing Cowboy has already barged into the bathroom, cradling a pint of bourbon. He’s pressing a drink on Lugosi—“Breakfast of champions,” he says—when he notices the syringe. He retrieves it, holds it up to the fly-specked light. “Hell, Bela,” he says, “I thought they got you off this stuff.”
“Yes,” Lugosi says, helping himself to a slug of the breakfast of champions. “So did I.”
Sitting there at the card table in Denny’s apartment, I sipped at a beer and turned the pages of the screenplay. The scenes sprang to life before me—Gene Autry’s discovery that his director is a transvestite (“Hell, son,” he says, “is that a skirt?”) and Lugosi’s developing conflict with his co-star. Bela, despite the morphine, is always the consummate professional. Autry, on the other hand, is a sloppy drunk. He forgets his lines; he misses his marks. Matters come to a head when they’re shooting the campfire scene that will introduce Autry’s character.
“Eddie,” Lugosi says to Wood, “horror picture is perhaps no place for singing ‘Back in the Saddle Again.’”
“But he’s the Singing Cowboy,” Wood protests.
Lugosi, too focused to notice that Autry has walked up behind him, says, “His voice, Eddie, it is not so good anymore.”
Eddie’s eyes widen. “Bela—” he says.
Too late.
Autry’s hand closes over Lugosi’s shoulder. When he turns, Autry’s face looms into his field of vision like a small moon, blotchy and cratered with pores.
“Why you son of a bitch,” he says. “You junkie, you ghoul.”
And then he punches Lugosi in the face.
* * *
Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code, a set of ten rules by which the Singing Cowboy’s young fans were to live their lives, expressly forbade socking seventy-four-year-old men in the jaw. “The cowboy must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals,” Rule Number 4 read. I know this because Denny inserted the entire code as a title card into his screenplay. In the scene immediately following, he imagined a reconciliation between the two men. The slug line placed the action in the Cameo Club, the bar Lugosi—the real Lugosi—frequented in the final year or two of his life. To my knowledge no pictures of the place survive, but I have always imagined it much as Denny described it: dim and cool, with scuffed barstools and booths of buttoned red leather: an old man’s bar, quiet, little frequented, Lugosi nursing his bruised jaw with a cheap scotch when Autry sits down beside him.
“Have you come to punch me again?” Lugosi inquires.
“No.” Autry sighs. “Eddie said I might find you here.”
“I do not wish to be found.” Lugosi stands, dropping a handful of bills on the bar. “Good evening, Mr. Autry.”
“Stay a while, why don’t you?” Autry says, touching Lugosi’s elbow. “I’ll buy you a drink. Hell, I’ll buy you a dozen, if you like.”
“Please not to touch me,” Lugosi says, but he slides back onto the stool.
Drinks are ordered: bourbon, a t
op-shelf scotch.
Autry sighs, lifts his glass in toast. “It’s a slippery goddamn slope, isn’t it, Bela? One day you take a drink, the next you take two, and suddenly you can’t get through the day without the stuff.” He snorts. “You know what I mean?”
A bit of stage business follows. Lugosi takes out a lighter and lights one of his reeking cigars. He takes his time getting it going, turning the cigar in the flame until he has it burning evenly. He puts the lighter on the bar. “Bourbon, morphine,” he says. “It is the same. Sometimes, I think it would be better if I—” He shakes his head, draws on the cigar, expels a stream of noxious smoke.
“Sometimes what?”
“It does not matter. I am too much a coward.” Lugosi meets Autry’s gaze. “And you, Mr. Autry. What is it that you fear?”
Autry looks down. He turns his glass on the bar. “You know, Bela, I went to serve my country in the war. Flew C-109s over the Hump, and I was never afraid. But when I came back, Roy Rogers had taken over as the number one singing cowboy in America.” He shakes his head. “Irrelevance. I guess that’s what I fear the most.”
“You are a young man yet.”
“I’m forty-nine years old.”
“I was forty-nine when I played Dracula,” Lugosi says. “You have many lives yet. Me, I am an old man. Finished, as you Americans say.”
Autry laughs. “You Americans, huh? How long have you been in America, Bela?”
“A long time,” Bela says, and though Denny’s screenplay makes no such note—one of the limitations of cinema is that it has no access to its characters’ inner lives—I imagine Bela suddenly stricken with nostalgia for his native land. He had forever been a stranger to his adopted one. “Listen to my voice,” he says. “I am neither American nor Hungarian. I am always in between, a failure, a nothing.”
When Autry protests—“Now, Bela,” he begins—Lugosi waves him off. “You are a cowboy,” he says. “You are more than American, Mr. Autry. You are America. Me,” he says, “I am hunkie. I am failure. I am, as you say, a ghoul.”
* * *
I didn’t finish Denny’s screenplay—not then. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I snagged another beer from the refrigerator, retrieved The Ghoul Goes West from its hiding place in Denny’s closet, and plugged the tape into the VCR. I couldn’t really concentrate, though. My mind kept drifting back to Denny. I wondered where he’d found the thing. I wondered what he’d thought of it.
I think that’s what I missed most after Denny disappeared into Hollywood: just chewing over old movies with him, finding out what he thought about them. He was the only person I’d ever known who could talk about the films I wanted to talk about. Don’t misunderstand me. My classmates in the master’s program were cinema geeks, too. But they wanted to discuss Buñuel and Visconti. Denny and I were more interested in O’Brien and Harryhausen. They read Film Quarterly. We subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The last movie we saw together was Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir, Kiss of Death. Mom had been gone two years by then. I had just finished college with a more-or-less useless degree in English and had taken the year off to contemplate pursuing a still more useless degree in Film Studies. In the meantime, I was working in a video store and conducting a scattershot survey of film history, skipping around in the store’s collection at whim. I was in my blaxploitation phase when Denny called to say he was coming to visit.
“Why?” I remember asking.
“Just thought I’d catch up with my baby brother,” he told me. “That okay with you, Ben?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Which is how he ended up in Knoxville a month later, crowding into my run-down apartment in Fort Sanders. In the week that followed, he slept late while I put in my hours at the store. After I clocked out, we ate delivery pizza, drank beer, and watched whatever we’d selected from the shelves for the evening. And talked movies, of course—what we’d seen, what we wanted to see, what we should see. Directors and leading men. Starlets and scream queens. The night before he left we wandered up and down the aisles, looking for something to watch. I pushed for Darktown Strutters. Denny made a case for Run Silent, Run Deep. We compromised on Kiss of Death, though we’d both seen it before. It had Victor Mature in one of his best roles, and we both loved Richard Widmark’s star-making turn as an unhinged, giggling psychopath named Tommy Udo. And of course it also had perennial heavy Brian Donlevy, cast against type as an assistant district attorney.
Donlevy had his own connection to Lugosi.
In 1952, after Lugosi fell on hard times, his then-wife, Lillian Arch, went to work as an assistant on Donlevy’s TV program Dangerous Assignment. Donlevy and Lillian soon became close. At one point Lugosi, drunk and stricken with jealousy, called the Dangerous Assignment production office, and demanded to speak with Donlevy. “That man is destroying my marriage,” he raved. Sober, he regretted his loss of composure, the latest in a series of self-inflicted humiliations, both personal and professional. The final blow came when Lillian left him less than a year later. Donlevy must have played a role in her decision—she would marry him in 1966, ten years after Lugosi’s death—but I think she loved Lugosi all the same. She’d stayed with him through two difficult decades, watching helplessly as he spiraled into morphine addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. Though he couldn’t see it, Bela was the one destroying the marriage, not Donlevy. He’d just worn Lillian out.
Denny disagreed. “It wasn’t Bela’s fault, not the way you mean. Those were symptoms, not the problem. If he’d made different decisions—”
“Like accepting the Karloff role in Frankenstein, I guess.” This line of reasoning was nothing new. Lugosi had famously declined the role. He didn’t want to endure hours in make-up every day. He didn’t want a part without lines. He didn’t want to be typecast as America’s bogeyman—though of course it was already too late for that. He was too old to be the leading man he’d hoped to become. His accent was too thick, the impression he’d made as Dracula too indelible.
Karloff, on the other hand, had accepted the role—had embraced it, and turned in a performance still stunning in its pathos. Frankenstein elevated him to stardom, and he made all the right choices thereafter. He embraced his role as the bogeyman, held out for good parts, and went on to enduring success.
Lugosi became Karloff’s shadow other self, Karloff what Lugosi might have been.
But Denny had another perspective. Turning down the role had been a life-changing mistake, sure—assuming he could have turned in a performance of Karloff’s caliber. But Bela had even then had it within his power to save himself.
“How?”
Stardom is a tricky thing, Denny told me. An illusion. Gossamer and moonlight. “You have to act the part,” he said. “No matter how dire the circumstances, you hang on to the fancy cars, you make yourself seen at the best restaurants, you date the most beautiful women. You project the illusion long enough, you become it.”
“The man was bankrupt in 1932,” I objected.
“The man was too proud to call in his markers.”
“What markers?”
“Bela was huge in 1932. He should have traded on that celebrity. All he needed to do was hang on for the right part. Instead, he sold himself short for the first thing that came along. He looked desperate. And desperation is fatal.”
“Whatever you say, Denny,” I said. “Come on—early day tomorrow.”
It was, too. We were up before dawn, off to the airport. It was raining lightly, and as the oncoming cars hissed by, shadows streamed across Denny’s face. He was quiet, pensive.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
Denny studied the strip malls as they slipped past. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
“Okay.”
“I need money, Ben.”
“Money? Jesus, Denny, Mom left you forty thousand dollars.”
“You don’t under—”
“What about you
r talking dog? You made plenty of cash then, didn’t you?”
He sighed.
“Didn’t you?”
“Ben—”
“Answer me.”
“It’s gone,” he said. Then, gazing out at the line of mountains in the distance, dark against the brightening sky, he said, “It’s all gone.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s like I said last night,” he replied. “You have to look the part, okay? You have to be the thing you want to become. After a while, I just couldn’t maintain the lifestyle. I kept waiting for the next break.” He laughed. “You saying you don’t have the money, Ben?”
“I work in a video store.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yeah, I have it.” I hit the ramp for the airport exit too fast, and braked hard, the car leaning into the curve. “I need the money, Denny. I’m going back to school.”
“Right. Okay, then.”
A jet roared in overhead. I pulled to the curb at Departures. Traffic was just beginning to heat up. Taxis and shuttle buses, people smoking on the sidewalks. I got out and walked around the car and heaved Denny’s bag out of the trunk.
“You should come with me,” he said.
“You know that wouldn’t work.” I held out my hand. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
Denny ignored my hand. He pulled me into a hug. “You, too, Ben,” he said. And then, reaching for his bag: “But I guess I don’t have to worry about that, do I?”
He nodded and started off down the sidewalk. I watched him all the way through the sliding doors. He didn’t look back.
