Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  Last to arrive—with apologies—is Edward Van Sloan, minus the dignified hairpieces he usually wears on screen. In speech and carriage, the middle-aged actor is every bit the Broadway veteran, enunciating his consonants and accompanying them with broad but graceful gestures. He was in the first wave of talent imported from the eastern stage to lend voice to that frightening new innovation, the soundtrack. Many of the vamps, villains, and male and female leads who made the silent screen glitter cannot speak without demonstrating some accent or impediment inappropriate to their images; some cannot even act.

  Junior pardons Van Sloan’s tardiness with a shrug. “I expect to enjoy the show. Any test the Catholics tried so hard to stop is bound to be a sensation.”

  “Pious hypocrites, these special-interest thugs,” replies the actor. “When Bela and I did Dracula at the Fulton Theater, we went through a gallon of pig’s blood a week, and another pint when we added a second performance on Saturday. The Decency League said not a peep. We didn’t spill a single drop in the film, and they came swarming out of the woodwork like—like—”

  “Rats!” Lugosi finishes, in a respectable imitation of Dwight Frye’s loony Renfield. Laughing, he seizes Van Sloan’s hand. They know each other well from months on the road.

  Junior’s smile slips a notch. “Pious and powerful, don’t forget. The pressure’s even worse in England, where they have government censorship. Pop’s ready to pull the plug on Frankenstein if we lose that market.”

  “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley faced the same opposition when she published her book. That was one hundred years ago. Some things don’t change. But we have to.” Florey, who adapted the novel for his screenplay, taps a cigarette on the gold case it came from and fits it into a holder. “Tell Uncle Carl we can’t go on telling stories about sheiks and bullfighters. Pictures talk now; thanks to you.”

  The round of laughter puzzles Lugosi. Ivano, the cameraman, fills him in, in his studied dialect.

  “Junior would have made a splendid second-story man if he weren’t born in show business. He circumvented Warner’s Vitaphone patent by pilfering their sound equipment right off the lot.”

  “Under cover of midnight.” Van Sloan’s intonation is sepulchral.

  Junior’s grin returns. “Pop was proud as a peacock. He’s a bit of a buccaneer himself. He came out here one step ahead of Thomas Edison’s Pinkerton detectives. In those days, the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed sole ownership of the motion-picture-making process, and the courts backed him up.”

  “They told me in Budapest you were all gangsters over here.” Lugosi draws thoughtfully on his cigar. “I can see now they were right.”

  The Hungarian always sounds solemn, even when he’s joking. Junior, uncertain, changes the subject.

  “How did you get along with the makeup?”

  Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan stiffen, anticipating an explosion. But Lugosi is merely peevish. “That barbarian Jack Pierce wanted to give me a square head. I am an artist, not a scarecrow.” He leans heavily on the makeup expert’s name, ending it in a harsh sibilant: Jock Peerrsss. The Count would pronounce it just that way.

  “Bela did his own,” Ivano put in. “It left his face free and took the lighting well.”

  Junior is a diplomat. “Pierce is an artist too. We don’t want people confusing Frankenstein’s creation with the boss vampire just because the same actor played both roles.”

  Florey gestures impatiently with his cigarette. “I’m still on record in opposition to Bela playing the brute. He’s much better suited to Frankenstein himself.”

  “Fortunately, Robert has written me some lovely lines.” Bela blows a series of smoke rings.

  “You should thank Mary. The creature in the novel is quite articulate, and inclined to go on; I could’ve written sides. I don’t suppose you could live with Percy without some of his epic poetry rubbing off on you.”

  “He goes on a bit as it is. But we’ll discuss all that later.” Junior breezes through this dismissal. He’s consulted with his father on Florey’s script. Carl, Sr., doesn’t know Percy Shelley from an act in vaudeville, but he agrees with his son that no one with ears would accept a Hungarian Frankenstein’s Monster. They’ve decided the part will be mute. “Well, let’s see what you’ve all been up to this past week.”

  They take their places in plush tan mohair seats trimmed with glistening mahogany, an Art Deco theme introduced by Junior’s interior designer, who redid the screening room immediately after Uncle Carl promoted his employer to his present position. The lights dim, the projectionist starts his machine whirring, and a beam of white shoots out and lands on the screen, with the smoke from Florey’s cigarette and Lugosi’s cigar curling in the shaft.

  Director and studio chief watch the jumpy numerals counting down to the first frame with professional eyes, mentally adding editing and laboratory shellac to the rough-cut product to follow. Possibly a musical score; although that’s a subject of controversy in this brave new world of the sound feature. Will the audience be distracted, looking around and wondering where the music is coming from? Such a simple invention—a common phonograph record, synchronized to the action onscreen—and so profound in its effect. It has changed everything about the way the business is run, from casting through promotion to distribution. How will Garbo’s heavy Swedish accent and hoarse contralto play in Omaha? What will become of Fairbanks-style swashbucklers now that the camera is sealed in a soundproof cell and can no longer follow an actor swinging from a chandelier and bounding from the deck of one pirate ship to another? Can Ramon Novarro deliver a line without sounding like Blanche Sweet? Challenging times. It’s no wonder the torch has passed to the Jazz Age Generation.

  The screen test begins, on the gloomy Carfax Abbey set lately inhabited by the company of Dracula; if Junior likes what he sees, it will be transformed with painted canvas flats, clever lighting, and young Ken Strickfadden’s whiz-bang electric pinball machines into Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The five men sit unspeaking throughout the moody creation scene building up to the entrance of the synthetic man: the money shot that will make or break the picture, for in the heart of everyone connected with it lurks the hope of duplicating the sensation of Lon Chaney’s unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera. That shot sent millions to bed with all the lights on, and kept Universal solvent throughout the horrendously expensive transition to sound.

  It starts off well. Ivano is a journeyman cinematographer and the scene is a setpiece that adapts comfortably to the camera’s enforced incarceration in its bunkerlike enclosure, where the noise of its bearings and cooling fans cannot be recorded by the undiscriminating microphone. The lighting is basic, but serviceable, and the pace appropriate to suspense. Van Sloan is dependable as always. He reads his cynical lines in beautifully rounded tones to the contract player standing in for whoever will take his place in the lead. (Central Casting wants Leslie Howard, but Florey is holding out for someone equally British, but more dynamic. Is Ronald Colman available? Junior, who truly loves movies, wonders if he will ever again be able to watch one without being distracted by better alternatives.)

  The tiny audience fidgets while the reels are being changed. Throats are cleared. Commentary of any kind is considered bad luck, in the grand tradition of the theater. Lugosi extinguishes the stub of his cigar with a contented sigh and applies himself to the art and science of igniting another so that it burns evenly. He seems sanguine; who knows what goes on inside the head of an Eastern European, and an actor at that? Dracula, for him, is a contemporary documentary. In the village where he grew up, people did not hang garlands of garlic on their front doors to welcome Father Christmas. Junior clears his throat. It’s an ominous sign for Florey and Ivano, fellow Hollywood insiders that they are. Young Laemmle doesn’t smoke and is not inclined toward excess phlegm.

  The second reel commences to turn. All lean forward as Ivano’s camera tracks in tightly on Lugosi in full makeup, the round peasant face framed by a Buster Brown wig
blown up to Brobdingnagian proportions filling the screen, waxen and still but for the eyes, shifting from side to side with pin-lights reflecting off them, as they had in his signature film; an actor never abandons a trick that worked once. The shot resembles nothing that has ever been seen on film before.

  The tense silence is shattered by a strident sound: Junior Laemmle’s high-pitched laughter, innocent as a boy’s.

  An excruciating few seconds ensue: To the end of their lives, Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan will swear that they seemed like five long minutes. Finally, the last foot of celluloid flutters through the gate like a fish frantically escaping an angler’s net.

  The lights come up indecently fast. Everyone blinks.

  Silence.

  Junior springs to his feet, youthful energy incarnate in a five-foot, ninety-pound frame. “I’ll have my secretary arrange a conference. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  In comparison to the awful stillness following the end of the test, the round of handshaking seems lightning fast. Junior’s size-six feet in hand-lasted leather actually pitter-patter toward the exit.

  Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan stand with hands in pockets, looking at one another and the blank screen, as if they hold it responsible for what has taken place on its surface.

  “Ivano!”

  Lugosi’s loud baritone makes everyone else jump. He is beaming; no one has seen his face split so wide since the first review broke for Dracula in The Hollywood Reporter. “My close-up was magnificent!”

  He thrusts a fistful of cigars into the cameraman’s hand.

  Van Sloan, at least, has the presence of mind to respond. “Bela, you were never better.”

  Lugosi slaps his back—the pair were never that close, throughout their Broadway run and the long trek during the road production, but there is something about Hollywood, the scent of the strange flora on the dry desert air, the bankrolls that seem to grow like coconuts from the palms in an impoverished world—and strides out, trailing dollar clouds of smoke.

  “I never got the habit.” Ivano offers the cigars to Florey.

  The director keeps his hands in his pockets. “Keep the cigars. Burn the film.”

  10

  THE SINGLE METALLIC beep fell so far outside the world of 1931 it snatched him from his dream, alert on the instant. He was sitting on the sofa, Bela Lugosi’s biography lying open on his lap to the paragraphs Craig had underlined. The Oracle was dark but for the pool of light belonging to the lamp in the projection booth.

  Valentino fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket and read the text message Harriet had left:

  2 LATE 2 TALK NITE LUV U

  He smiled and began to text her back, but then he saw it was almost 5:00 A.M. If that was late for her, not early, she must have been out all night. He harbored evil thoughts about antiques dealers and ex-FBI agents everywhere, and snapped shut the cell.

  To stop thinking about Harriet, he thought about his dream. Harriet had told him he was the only person in the universe who didn’t star in his own fantasies; in this case he hadn’t even appeared, watching the action the way he watched movies. The lines Craig had marked in The Man Behind the Cape dealt with Lugosi’s disastrous screen test for Frankenstein, but had not included details, apart from Junior Laemmle’s laughter when the actor’s made-up face appeared and Lugosi’s gift of cigars to Paul Ivano over his delight regarding his close-up; the rest, including the conversation, had come from Valentino’s own imagination.

  Still, the episode must have gone something like what he’d dreamt. Robert Florey had mentioned it a number of times before his death, and Boris Karloff, who had not been present, had provided his own version. Karloff may or may not have seen the test, but he’d described Lugosi’s makeup as “hairy, not at all like our dear Monster.” Florey had compared it to the claylike features and massive wig worn by Paul Wegener in the German silent feature Der Golem in 1920. Whether or not Jack Pierce, the genius who’d created Karloff’s iconic look as the Monster, had indeed tried to fit Lugosi with a similar “square head” was conjecture; James Whale, who replaced Florey as director, later insisted that the final product was the result of a collaboration between himself and Pierce. But it was true the star of Dracula had not gotten along with the makeup man and his arduous procedures, and that upon learning that he would have no lines to speak as the Monster, had left the production abruptly. He and Florey had then teamed on The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a box office bomb in which the star was upstaged by a gorilla. Universal dropped the men and kept the ape.

  Robert Florey would have a moderately successful career as an in-house director with other studios, eventually moving to television; but for Bela Lugosi, rejecting the role that made Karloff’s fortune was the beginning of the long slide into Grade Z pictures, drug addiction, unemployment, and a squalid death. He was buried in 1956 in the opera cape he’d worn as Count Dracula, forgotten by Hollywood, while Karloff was enjoying a comfortable and active old age performing in movies and on TV.

  No one seemed to know what had happened to that two-reel test. Florey was said to have ordered its destruction, but he himself would not be drawn out when asked about it later. Valentino’s predecessors had hoped it would turn up in the director’s estate after his death in 1979, but it had not.

  Now he felt that familiar drumroll of mounting excitement. Had Craig somehow stumbled onto the reels, or guessed they were in Elizabeth Grundage’s possession and offered to cut a deal with her on their sale? Horace Lysander had said her late husband Tony had represented the stagehands’ and projectionists’ unions in Hollywood at the time Frankenstein was in production; had the nameless projectionist who screened the test for Junior Laemmle and the others spirited it away and given it to Tony in return for some favor that would further his career?

  The theory (to flatter it with that term) was shaky even if he’d had evidence to corroborate it. Why wouldn’t Tony have sold the reels immediately for whatever they were worth? And if he hadn’t and his widow had them, why would she need a washed-up actor to help her sell them?

  There was a possible answer to the second question, but he’d be going out on a limb to secure it without more information.

  He had a brainstorm. He flipped open his cell and had speed-dialed Kyle Broadhead at his home before he realized Fanta might be staying over. In the past, he’d been in the habit of calling the professor at all hours, knowing he was an insomniac and likely to be available. But that was in Broadhead’s widower days, before his courtship by a former student who was close to his equal in intelligence and more than his match in spirit. Valentino had his thumb on the END button when someone picked up. He hadn’t heard it ring.

  “You’re no fisherman,” Broadhead said in greeting, “so I have to assume you never went to bed. Are you trapped beneath rubble?”

  “Rubble, no. Red ink, yes. Are you alone?”

  “At this hour a gentleman would answer in the affirmative, regardless of the truth. However, I’m no gentleman. So— yes. My future intended is too busy orchestrating the romantic spectacle of the century to pursue romance. My cardiologist is celebrating.”

  Valentino told him his suspicions.

  “Unlikely,” said the other when he’d finished.

  “But not impossible.”

  “I would have said impossible, B.F. But you may take it to mean the same thing now.”

  B.F.: Before Fanta. “What do you think those two reels are worth, ballpark?”

  “The only preproduction poster known to exist hyping Bela Lugosi as the star of Frankenstein sold at Christie’s a few years ago for a hundred thousand, a record in the escalating vintage-poster market. The possibility that a second might surface kept the bidding from going even higher. But there can’t be two prints of a failed studio test on silver-nitrate. When you factor in inflation, ten times that figure would be conservative.”

  “A million dollars.”

  “Wizard figure, don’t you agree? Even with tycoons trading in hundreds of b
illions and governments in trillions, it still casts a spell. A fanatic with Mark David Turkus’ resources would be prepared to pay more.”

  “I wish you hadn’t mentioned him. His pit bull was sniffing around my office yesterday, trying to find out what I’m up to. At the time I didn’t know I was up to anything.”

  “Teddie’s more of a ferret. Something in the weasel family, in any case. It isn’t unusual for a creature of her type to suspect your motives before you have them.”

  “I can’t fathom a million for thirty minutes of film. Greed ran eight hours, and went for a fraction of that. It barely covered The Oracle’s new roof.”

  “Greed was straight drama. Adventure, horror, mystery, and science fiction have always been in greater demand. Give a first edition of Burroughs’s Tarzan another ten years, and it will be worth as much as a Shakespeare First Folio, and that had a three-hundred-year head start. We’re discussing capitalism, not artistic merit.”

  Tarzan made him think of Tarzana, and Lorna Hunter there mourning Craig. “I feel like I’m exploiting a friend’s tragedy. I didn’t go into this looking for buried treasure.”

  “Nothing says you can’t do both. If those reels exist and you manage to get your hands on them, you could write your own ticket with the Turk.”

  “I’m bound by my position to offer them to UCLA first. But, Kyle, I have to maintain my focus. If it’s a choice between finding that test and bringing Craig’s murderer to justice—”

  “You’re not bound by your position to bring anyone to justice. But if you’re hell-bent on meddling in things man should leave alone, no one is saying you can’t do both. If that material has anything to do with why Hunter was killed, finding the one may include finding the other.”

  Valentino hesitated. “I can’t tell if you’re scolding me or giving me your blessing.”

  “I haven’t the moral authority to do either, but if you’re going to play Boston Blackie anyway, I want to be in on the game.”

  “But what will Fanta say?”