The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  The reasons for the abandonment of Count Dracula remain obscure. It has been speculated that RKO were nervous about Welles’s stated intention to film most of the story with a first-person camera, adopting the viewpoints of the various characters as Stoker does in his might-have-been fictional history. Houseman, in his memoir Run-Through (1972), alleges that Welles’ enthusiasm for this device was at least partly due to the fact that it would keep the fearless vampire slayers – Harker, Van Helsing, Quincey, Holmwood – mostly off screen, while Dracula, object of their attention, would always be in view. Houseman, long estranged from Welles at the time of writing, needlessly adds that Welles would have played Dracula. He toyed with the idea of playing Harker as well, before deciding William Alland could do it if kept to the shadows and occasionally dubbed by Welles. The rapidly-changing political situation in Europe, already forcing the Roosevelt administration to reassess its policies about vampirism and the very real Count Dracula, may have prompted certain factions to bring pressure to bear on RKO that such a film was “inadvisable” for 1940.

  In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, published in This is Orson Welles (1992) but held well before Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial Dracula (1979), Welles said: “Dracula would make a marvellous movie. In fact, nobody has ever made it; they’ve never paid any attention to the book, which is the most hair-raising, marvellous book in the world. It’s told by four people, and must be done with four narrations, as we did on the radio. There’s one scene in London where he throws a heavy bag into the corner of a cellar and it’s full of screaming babies! They can go that far out now.

  —Jonathan Gates, “Welles’ Lost Draculas”,

  Video Watchdog No. 23 May–July 1994

  VII

  Welles did not so much live in the bungalow as occupy it. She recognized the signs of high-end, temporary tenancy. Pieces of extremely valuable antique furniture, imported from Spain, stood among ugly, functional, modern sticks that had come with the let. The den, largest space in the building, was made aesthetically bearable by a hanging she put at sixteenth-century, nailed up over the open fireplace like a curtain. The tapestry depicted a knight trotting in full armour through forest greenery, with black-faced, red-eyed-and-tongued devils peeping from behind tall, straight trees. The piece was marred by a bad burn that had caught at one corner and spread evil fingers upwards. All around were stacks of books, square-bound antique volumes and bright modern paperbacks, and rickety towers of film cans.

  Geneviève wondered why Welles would have cases of good sherry and boxes of potato chips stacked together in a corner, then realized he must have been part-paid in goods for his commercial work. He offered her sherry and she surprised him by accepting.

  “I do sometimes drink wine, Orson. Dracula wasn’t speaking for us all.”

  He arched an eyebrow and made a flourish of pouring sherry into a paper cup.

  “My glassware hasn’t arrived from Madrid,” he apologised.

  She sipped the stuff, which she couldn’t really taste, and sat on a straight-backed gothic chair. It gave her a memory-flash, of hours spent in churches when she was a warm girl. She wanted to fidget.

  Welles plumped himself down with a Falstaffian rumble and strain on a low couch that had a velvet curtain draped over it. He was broad enough in the beam to make it seem like a throne.

  Oja joined them and silently hovered. Her hair was covered by a bright headscarf.

  A pause.

  Welles grinned, expansively. Geneviève realized he was protracting the moment, relishing a role. She even knew who he was doing, Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. The ambiguous mastermind enjoying himself by matching wits with the perplexed private eye. If Hollywood ever remade Falcon, which would be a sacrilege, Welles would be in the ring for Gutman. Too many of his acting jobs were like that, replacing another big personality in an inferior retread of something already got right.

  “I’ll be wondering why you asked me here tonight,” she prompted.

  “Yes,” he said, amused.

  “It’ll be a long story.”

  “I’m rather afraid so.”

  “There are hours before dawn.”

  “Indeed.”

  Welles was comfortable now. She understood he had been switching off from the shoot, coming down not only from his onscreen character but from his position as backyard God.

  “You know I’ve been playing with Dracula for years? I wanted to make it at RKO in ’40, did a script, designed sets, cast everybody. Then it was dropped.”

  She nodded.

  “We even shot some scenes. I’d love to steal in some night and rescue the footage from the vaults. Maybe for use in the current project. But the studio has the rights. Imagine if paintings belonged to whoever mixed the paints and wove the canvas. I’ll have to abase myself, as usual. The children who inherited RKO after Hughes ran it aground barely know who I am, but they’ll enjoy the spectacle of my contrition, my pleading, my total dejection. I may even get my way in the end.”

  “Hasn’t Dracula been made? I understand that Francis . . .”

  “I haven’t seen that. It doesn’t matter to me or the world. I didn’t do the first stage productions of Macbeth or Caesar, merely the best. The same goes for the Stoker. A marvellous piece, you know.”

  “Funnily enough, I have read it,” she put in.

  “Of course you have.”

  “And I met Dracula.”

  Welles raised his eyes, as if that were news to him. Was this all about picking her brains? She had spent all of fifteen minutes in the Royal Presence, nearly a hundred years ago, but was quizzed about that (admittedly dramatic) occasion more than the entire rest of her five hundred and sixty-five years. She’d seen the Count again, after his true death – as had Welles, she remembered – and been at his last funeral, seen his ashes scattered. She supposed she had wanted to be sure he was really finally dead.

  “I’ve started Dracula several times. It seems like a cursed property. This time, maybe, I’ll finish it. I believe it has to be done.”

  Oja laid hands on his shoulders and squeezed. There was an almost imperial quality to Welles, but he was an emperor in exile, booted off his throne and cast out, retaining only the most loyal and long-suffering of his attendants.

  “Does the name Alucard mean anything to you?” he asked. “John Alucard?”

  “This may come as a shock to you, Orson, but ‘Alucard’ is ‘Dracula’ spelled backwards.”

  He gave out a good-humoured version of his Shadow laugh.

  “I had noticed. He is a vampire, of course.”

  “Central and Eastern European nosferatu love anagrams as much as they love changing their names,” she explained. “It’s a real quirk. My late friend Carmilla Karnstein ran through at least half a dozen scramblings of her name before running out. Millarca, Marcilla, Allimarc . . .”

  “My name used to be Olga Palinkas,” put in Oja. “Until Orson thought up ‘Oja Kodar’ for me, to sound Hungarian.”

  “The promising sculptor ‘Vladimir Zagdrov’ is my darling Oja too. You are right about the undead predilection for noms de plumes, alter egos, secret identities, anagrams and palindromes and acrostics. Just like actors. A hold-over from the Byzantine mindset, I believe. It says something about the way the creatures think. Tricky but obvious, as it were. The back-spelling might also be a compensation: a reflection on parchment for those who have none in the glass.”

  “This Alucard? Who is he?”

  “That’s the exact question I’d like answered,” said Welles. “And you, my dear Mademoiselle Dieudonné, are the person I should like to provide that answer.”

  “Alucard says he’s an independent producer,” said Oja. “With deals all over town.”

  “But no credits,” said Welles.

  Geneviève could imagine.

  “He has money, though,” said Welles. “No credits, but a line of credit. Cold cash and the Yankee Dollar banish all doubt. That seems unarguable.”<
br />
  “Seems?”

  “Sharp little word, isn’t it. Seems and is, syllables on either side of a chasm of meaning. This Mr Alucard, a nosferatu, wishes to finance my Dracula. He has offered me a deal the likes of which I haven’t had since RKO and Kane. An unlimited budget, major studio facilities, right of final cut, control over everything from casting to publicity. The only condition he imposes is that I must make this subject. He wants not my Don Quixote or my Around the World in 80 Days, but my Dracula only.”

  “The Coppola,” – a glare from Welles made her rephrase – “that other film, with Brando as the Count? That broke even in the end, didn’t it? Made back its budget. Dracula is a box-office subject. There’s probably room for another version. Not to mention sequels, a spin-off TV series and imitations. Your Mr Alucard makes sense. Especially if he has deep pockets and no credits. Being attached to a good, to a great, film would do him no harm. Perhaps he wants the acclaim?”

  Welles rolled the idea around his head.

  “No,” he concluded, almost sadly. “Gené, I have never been accused of lack of ego. My largeness of spirit, my sense of self-worth, is part of my act, as it were. The armour I must needs haul on to do my daily battles. But I am not blind to my situation. No producer in his right mind would bankroll me to such an extent, would offer me such a deal. Not even these kids, this Spielberg and that Lucas, could get such a sweetheart deal. I am as responsible for that as anyone. The studios of today may be owned by oil companies and hotel magnates, but there’s a race memory of that contract I signed when I was twenty-four and of how it all went wrong, for me and for everyone. When I was kicked off the lot in 1943, RKO took out ads in the trades announcing their new motto, ‘showmanship, not genius’! Hollywood doesn’t want to have me around. I remind the town of its mistakes, its crimes.”

  “Alucard is an independent producer, you say. Perhaps he’s a fan?”

  “I don’t think he’s seen any of my pictures.”

  “Do you think this is a cruel prank?”

  Welles shrugged, raising huge hands. Oja was more guarded, more worried. Geneviève wondered whether she was the one who had insisted on calling in an investigator.

  “The first cheques have cleared,” said Welles. “The rent is paid on this place.”

  “You are familiar with the expression . . .”

  “The one about equine dentistry? Yes.”

  “But it bothers you? The mystery?”

  “The Mystery of Mr Alucard. That is so. If it blows up in my face, I can stand that. I’ve come to that pass before and I shall venture there again. But I should like some presentiment, either way. I want you to make some discreet inquiries about our Mr Alucard. At the very least, I’d like to know his real name and where he comes from. He seems very American at the moment, but I don’t think that was always the case. Most of all, I want to know what he is up to. Can you help me, Mademoiselle Dieudonné?”

  VIII

  “You know, Gené,” said Jack Martin wistfully, contemplating the melting ice in his empty glass through the wisps of cigarette smoke that always haloed his head, “none of this matters. It’s not important. Writing. It’s a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It’s just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen. It’s just the sick soul of America turning sour in the sunshine. Nobody really reads what I’ve written. In this town, they don’t know Flannery O’Connor or Ray Bradbury, let alone Jack Martin. Nothing will be remembered. We’ll all die and it’ll be over. The sands will close over our civilization and the sun will turn into a huge red fireball and burn even you from the face of the earth.”

  “That’s several million years away, Jack,” she reminded him.

  He didn’t seem convinced. Martin was a writer. In high school, he’d won a national competition for an essay entitled “It’s Great to Be Alive”. Now in his grumbling forties, the sensitive but creepy short stories that were his most personal work were published in small science fiction and men’s magazines, and put out in expensive limited editions by fan publishers who went out of business owing him money. He had made a living as a screenwriter for ten years without ever seeing anything written under his own name get made. He had a problem with happy endings.

  However, he knew what was going on in “the Industry” and was her first port of call when a case got her mixed up with the movies. He lived in a tar-paper shack on Beverly Glen Boulevard, wedged between multi-million dollar estates, and told everybody that at least it was earthquake-proof.

  Martin rattled the ice. She ordered him another Coca-Cola. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another.

  The girl behind the hotel bar, dressed as a magician, sloshed ice into another glass and reached for a small chromed hose. She squirted coke into the glass, covering the ice.

  Martin held up his original glass.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could slip the girl a buck and have her fill up this glass, not go through all the fuss of getting a fresh one and charging you all over again. There should be infinite refills. Imagine that, a utopian dream, Gené. It’s what America needs. A bottomless coke!”

  “It’s not policy, sir,” said the girl. With the coke came a quilted paper napkin, an unhappy edge of lemon and a plastic stirrer.

  Martin looked at the bar-girl’s legs. She was wearing black fishnets, high-heeled pumps, a tight white waistcoat, a tail coat and top-hat.

  The writer sampled his new, bottomed, coke. The girl went to cope with other morning customers.

  “I’ll bet she’s an actress,” he said. “I think she does porno.”

  Geneviève raised an eyebrow.

  “Most X-rated films are better directed than the slop that comes out of the majors,” Martin insisted. “I could show you a reel of something by Gerard Damiano or Jack Horner that you’d swear was Bergman or Don Siegel. Except for the screwing.”

  Martin wrote “scripts” for adult movies, under well-guarded pseudonyms to protect his Writer’s Guild membership. The Guild didn’t have any moral position on porno, but members weren’t supposed to take jobs which involved turning out a full-length feature script in two afternoons for three hundred dollars. Martin claimed to have invented Jamie Gillis’ catchphrase, “suck it, bitch!”

  “What can you tell me about John Alucard?”

  “The name is . . .”

  “Besides that his name is ‘Dracula’ written backwards.”

  “He’s from New York. Well, that’s where he was last. I heard he ran with that art crowd. You know, Warhol and Jack Smith. He’s got a first-look deal at United Artists, and something cooking with Fox. There’s going to be a story in the trades that he’s set up an independent production company with Griffin Mill, Julia Phillips and Don Simpson.”

  “But he’s never made a movie?”

  “The word is that he’s never seen a movie. That doesn’t stop him calling himself a producer. Say, are you working for him? If you could mention that I was available. Mention my rewrite on Can’t Stop the Music. No, don’t. Say about that TV thing that didn’t happen. I can get you sample scripts by sun-down.”

  Martin was gripping her upper arm.

  “I’ve never met Alucard, Jack. I’m checking into him for a client.”

  “Still, if you get the chance, Gené. You know what it would mean to me. I’m fending off bill-collectors and Sharkko Press still hasn’t come through for the Tenebrous Twilight limiteds. A development deal, even a rewrite or a polish, could get me through winter and spring. Buy me time to get down to Ensenada and finish some stories.”

  She would have to promise. She had learned more than the bare facts. The light in Jack Martin’s eyes told her something about John Alucard. He had some sort of magic effect, but she didn’t know whether he was a conjurer or a wizard.

  Now, she would have to build on that.

  IX

  Short of forcing her way into Aluca
rd’s office and asking outright whether he was planning on leaving Orson Welles in the lurch, there wasn’t much more she could do. After Martin, she made a few phone calls to industry contacts, looked over recent back numbers of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and hit a couple of showbiz watering holes, hoping to soak up gossip.

  Now, Geneviève was driving back along the Pacific Coast Highway to Paradise Cove. The sun was down and a heavy, unstarred darkness hung over the sea. The Plymouth, which she sometimes suspected of having a mind of its own, handled gently, taking the blind curves at speed. She twiddled the radio past a lot of disco, and found a station pumping out two-tone. That was good, that was new, that was a culture still alive.

  “ . . . mirror in the bathroom, recompense

  all my crimes of self-defence . . .”

  She wondered about what she had learned.

  It wasn’t like the old days, when the studios were tight little fiefdoms and a stringer for Louella Parsons would know everything going on in town and all the current scandal. Most movies weren’t even made in Hollywood any more, and the studios were way down on the lists of interests owned by multi-national corporations with other primary concerns. The buzz was that United Artists might well be changing its name to TransAmerica Pictures.

  General word confirmed most of what Martin had told her, and turned up surprisingly few extra details. Besides the Welles deal, financed off his own line of credit with no studio production coin as yet involved, John Alucard had projects in development all over town, with high-end talent attached. He was supposed to be in bed with Michael Cimino, still hot off The Deer Hunter, on The Lincoln County Wars, a Western about the vampire outlaw Billy the Kid and a massacre of settlers in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1870s. With the Mill-Simpson-Phillips set-up, he was helping the long in-development Anne Rice project, Interview with the Mummy, which Elaine May was supposed to be making with Cher and Ryan O’Neal, unless it was Nancy Walker, with Diana Ross and Mark Spitz.