Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  Wearily, Valentino gathered some of the books at one end into a stack to make room for himself, then rested them in his lap and selected one. He didn’t know if he was looking for answers or just a diversion to settle his swarming thoughts and make him drowsy enough to sleep.

  The book was James Whale’s Frankenstein, part of the Film Classics Library line issued by Universe Books in 1974. The titles were aimed at the hard-core film buff who was accustomed to setting his alarm clock for some wee hour in order to catch a cherished classic on the Late Late Show, back when cable and satellite were in their infancy and round-the-clock movie channels a dream. The books featured frames from great vintage motion pictures blown up and presented in sequence, with the actors’ lines captioned below in a photographic novel effect, the next best thing to watching the films. Included in the line were The Maltese Falcon, Ninotchka, Casablanca, Psycho, and a host of other cinema legends, which had sold briskly for a few years until the first reasonably priced videocassette players appeared in stores. For the first time, amateur aficionados were free to screen any movie or TV show they wanted anytime. The Film Classics Library paled in comparison and was discontinued.

  However, scholars like Valentino found it valuable for confirming a spoken line or a visible bit of business without having to fast-forward or backtrack through a tape or disc like a dog chasing an agile rabbit. But after turning a few pages, the movie lover in Valentino kicked in, whetting his appetite to see Frankenstein as it was intended to be seen, hearing the voices of the stage-trained cast and catching himself up in the illusion of the moving image. He closed the book, shifted the stack to the floor, and got up to rummage through the essentials of his DVD collection, spared from separate storage and arranged alphabetically by title on the built-in shelves that in The Oracle’s glory days had supported big flat cans containing reels of silver-nitrate stock. Those same shelves had yielded a complete print of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, the multiple-hour silent masterpiece that had sucked Valentino into the vortex of property ownership and architectural restoration.

  He came up with the 75th Anniversary Edition of Frankenstein, digitally remastered from the original negative, including scenes censored from 1931 showings and issued in 2006. After inspecting the disc for dust and scratches, he fed it into his DVR, which was connected to the DLP projector mounted on the ceiling and pointed through the aperture of the booth onto the poly screen he’d had installed at the front of the auditorium below. The time would come when in order to maintain the theater he would show real films via the big Bell & Howell to paying audiences, but he’d gone house-hunting to begin with to find a place to live and screen movies in all formats to aid him in research.

  For the next seventy minutes, Valentino was a boy again, holed up in his bedroom in front of a grainy TV set with his dog resting comfortably in his lap. At times the production values were creaky, and now and then a hole appeared in the plot (How did the Monster find his way back to his creator on Frankenstein’s wedding day? How did Ludwig know his daughter had been murdered and not drowned by accident? Why did Frankenstein lock his bride in her room, trapping her, with the Monster on the rampage?); but the buzz and crackle of weird electric gizmos in the brooding laboratory, the plummy vocal tones of theater actors projecting to the last row, and the dramatic, lumbering entrance of Karloff in full makeup and rig thundered over nit-picking details like a juggernaut hurtling downhill, obliterating everything in its path.

  When the windmill containing the haunted, hunted creature collapsed in flames and the end credits came on, in a single shot under the heading A GOOD CAST IS WORTH REPEATING, he realized he’d watched the entire picture without once looking for an indication of Craig Hunter’s sudden interest in it. And so he watched it again all the way through, this time with the commentary track turned on so he could hear what the experts had to say.

  James Whale’s direction held up, but at this remove it was obvious that none of the “name” players, the somewhat hammy Colin Clive, the stiff John Boles, and Mae Clarke as Clive’s timid love interest, had contributed as much to the film’s enduring legend as Jack Pierce’s groundbreaking efforts with greasepaint, collodion, and aluminum struts to create a convincing creature assembled from corpses and brought to life, and Boris Karloff’s ability, beneath all those layers of artifice and despite having no lines to speak, to move viewers with a deep sense of humanity and pathos. Edward Van Sloan, in a dynamic turn as Clive’s mentor (who except for his lack of humor bore a certain resemblance to Kyle Broadhead), made a fine cerebral foil for the furious and bewildered artificial man, who eventually made him his victim, blind brute force destroying wisdom.

  During production, after a female employee of Universal fainted at the sight of the actor in full makeup wandering the lot, Carl Laemmle, the head of the studio, had required Pierce to lead Karloff around between scenes with a heavy veil covering his features to avoid frightening any pregnant secretaries into having miscarriages. When the movie opened, ambulances were parked outside theaters in case of heart attacks among the patrons. Such stories smacked of the publicity stunt, but there was no doubt that Depression audiences were shaken by a new kind of talking feature in a landscape of frothy musicals and romantic weepies. Decades of familiarity and an ever-rising bar of cinema shock had sapped the film of much of its power to scare, but it still managed to fascinate on a first viewing, and to satisfy on a tenth. That was the definition of a classic.

  But it brought no answers. What was in it for Craig? And if, from what Horace Lysander had said, Frankenstein was key, what were biographies and filmographies of Bela Lugosi doing in the suitcase he’d left with his ex-wife? Lugosi had turned down Frankenstein, after—

  Valentino sat up straight, galvanized by the spark of an idea that had glowed dully much earlier in the day, then gone out. From among the books spread around him he excavated The Man Behind the Cape, a Lugosi biography. And found, a quarter of the way through, a long passage underlined in (he had no doubt) Craig’s unsteady hand.

  **

  II

  WHEN THE HOUSE IS

  FILLED WITH DREAD

  **

  CHAPTER

  9

  June 1931

  “IT IS GOOD to see you, junior.”

  The Havana cigar exits the sardonically curved lips just long enough for the Hungarian to finish the greeting, then resumes its place as he grasps the hand belonging to the nervous young man with the long-toothed grin. Those lips, that intense stare, and especially the suave, sinuous accent, have chilled and seduced millions.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lugosi. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

  Carl Laemmle, Jr.—the most powerful man in the room, for all his youth and tiny stature—cannot help but behave like a starstruck fan. The tall Continental in the beautiful black suit towers over him by a foot, and although he is almost invariably cordial, his manner seems aloof, as though he’s been a movie star for many years instead of just four months. Few who have met him suspect the truth, that his limited command of English is responsible for his distant manner. The man is shy and somewhat suspicious of being taken advantage of with good reason: Dracula has saved the studio from bankruptcy, but Bela Lugosi was paid only five hundred dollars for playing the lead.

  The young man turns away to welcome the two men who have entered the screening room behind the actor. Cameraman Paul Ivano, the only native-born American of the three, but who affects European ways, bows smartly; there is about the gesture a faint impression of heels clicking. Conversely, Robert Florey, a husky, six-foot-four Frenchman, stoops to pump Laemmle’s hand like a bluff Midwesterner. He is one of Hollywood’s legendary hosts, whose stock is high with every caterer, florist, and bootlegger in three counties. Both men address the twenty-three-year-old chief of production as Junior: His father, who founded the studio (and incidentally the West Coast motion picture industry), is “Uncle Carl” to everyone at Universal.

  Las
t 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 Vita-phone 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 w
ig 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.