Kate Jackson was the only actor who ever made me break up during taping. We would bait each other during rehearsal, giggling like schoolgirls in church, until the wrath came down from the control room. In the last days of the show we played sisters, and I remember that we were given many mysteries to unravel.
Our relationship off-stage was so silly, and our on-stage characters were so solemn, that we often suppressed fits of hysteria. She once had a perfectly innocuous line that seemed to both of us to be the most absurd and idiotic either of us had ever had to say. The line was, simply, “Everything Ezra told you was true.”
We barely made it through rehearsal. She would deliver the line in the most dignified manner she could muster, and we would both fall apart. No one else was amazed. The crew watched us with bored disdain as we continually collapsed into paroxysms of laughter over this ridiculous line.
Taping began and we came to the scene. She looked at me with those dark eyes, her face totally dead-pan, took a breath, and began to speak. “Everything...” She was very serious, but I thought I saw her chin quiver. “Ezra... told... you...” Now I was biting my lip until it bled, “was... true!” We were both stiff with self-imposed restraint. But I noticed that she looked a bit strange. She was screwing up her mouth as though she had eaten a green persimmon.
After that, if I was ever down in the dumps, she would whisper in my ear, “Remember, everything Ezra told you!” And I would always smile.
I never went back to Wisconsin. When the show went off the air, I went to California, so that my children could grow up near the ocean and I could become a movie star. I thought of Dark Shadows as only the first step up the ladder of success. Although I played many wonderful parts, and had many lovely opportunities, years later I realized that Dark Shadows had been my most exciting job. I knew then that racing down the little narrow stairway to taping, in an 1890’s gown, with false curls bouncing and fake eyelashes in place, was in many ways as good as it gets. It was television. It was theatre. We belonged to a fabulous team. And we were telling great stories! What more could you ever want?
Grayson, Sam and Matthew
DARK SHADOWS AND ME
By Matthew Hall
I wasn’t really aware of Dark Shadows until it saved my parents’ lives. Though I may have known about it, before my family got involved, I don’t think I’d ever watched it—I had the full complement of after-school piano lessons, karate lessons and other traditional forms of extracurricular parentally suggested improvements to worry about in 1967. I was nine years old, and there was a limit to the amount of television I was allowed to watch—half an hour a week, which I remember distinctly thinking was not enough. An only child, I never understood how my parents could be so strict with me when they had both worked, at times, in television. My father was a writer; he had done soap operas and plays. My mother was an Academy award-nominated actress; she had done a movie for Disney that most of my friends had seen. For some reason, that embarrassed me—I was shy, and none of my other school friends had their home lives balloon weirdly into their school lives in this manner. I was in private school, learning about mythology and playing soccer at recess. We lived in a rambling apartment in Midtown Manhattan. It was, I thought, altogether a splendid existence. I had no idea how close we were to financial disaster.
Thinking back on it, though, there were signs. 1967 was the year I stopped eating in the lunchroom and started having my lunch packed by Mom every morning. Mom being Mom, one day I opened my plain black lunchbox to find a leftover fried chicken drumstick, a steamed artichoke and a thermos full of vinaigrette. I poured a little of the vinaigrette into the plastic thermos cup, dipped an artichoke leaf in, lifted it to my lips—and froze when I realized all the other lunchbox kids in the room had all put down their sandwiches and were staring at me like I was some kind of madman. My parents had always had a wonderful ability to live life in a manner utterly beyond their means.
Unfortunately, the long delayed day of reckoning finally came to seem inevitable, and in the late Spring of 1967, my father swallowed his pride and took a trip to Ohio. He had been born in Carrollton, a one-stoplight farm town filled with Hall family relations, and had struggled mightily to proclaim his independence from his father, an industrial wizard with dynastic intentions who had built a rubber glove factory from nothing in the depression. Dad had always felt the need to write, and he’d always done it better than anyone around him. Dartmouth, World War Two and the Yale Drama School had allowed him to strike out on his own. Now, however, he had a family, and no money. He went back to Ohio to find out whether or not, emotionally, it would be possible for him to swallow his dreams and take up the life of a successful small businessman that my grandfather had always intended as his future. My father is a proud man who had made a break with his roots many years before. I can only imagine the desperation with which he walked the streets of Carrollton that spring, looking at houses and knowing he was on the verge of giving up any dreams he and his wife might have had about carving lives for themselves in the New York theatrical community.
Back in New York, Mom came home one afternoon from an unsuccessful round of auditioning. She no more wanted the life of a midwestern actress manqué than my father, but she was prepared for that eventuality—after all, they had a child to support. She stripped off her clothes, turned on the shower, stuck one leg through the curtain—and the phone rang. She stood for a moment, perched on one foot, and debated ignoring it. Three more seconds, and the telephone would have been a moot point. But she wasn’t standing in the shower yet, so reluctantly she pulled her leg back, stomped around to the bedroom, and answered the phone.
It was her agent. He had heard of a short-term job on a soap. Was she interested in auditioning?
She was indeed.
Mom had what had to have been the best introduction of any character ever presented to a television audience. In her first scene on Dark Shadows she hypnotized Maggie Evans, whom the vampire had kidnapped and brainwashed into believing was his Eighteenth Century long lost love Josette. The Dark Shadows audience first saw my mother waving a watch in front of the distraught girl, and repeating: “My name is Julia Hoffman,” over and over again. By the end of the scene, Maggie was hypnotized; I always wondered if possibly the audience wasn’t as well.
Mom was set up to be a victim of the vampire. The character had originally been referred to onscreen as Julian Hoffman, but the noted serologist was changed to a woman because it would be sexier for the vampire to bite a woman than a man. The irony is that in the five years she was on the show, the one thing Barnabas never did to Julia was bite her.
One night the next fall, Mom threw a party and had the cast to our apartment. Very late into the evening, Dad found himself embroiled in a long conversation with Dan Curtis. At the end of the party, Dan asked my father to write for the show. Dad, who did not consider a question asked at two in the morning to be a serious business proposal, told Dan that if he was serious, he could call and ask him tomorrow. Dan called the next day, announced he was serious, and offered my father the job.
I began watching the show regularly that first year. I wanted to watch it religiously, but the sudden infusion of income meant that my extracurricular activities resumed their stranglehold on my weekday afternoons. Nonetheless, I saw it whenever I could—and on days when my Mom was working, I often went to the studio after my piano lessons or Karate. I felt welcome there; I could hang out in her dressing room when she was taping or sit and watch them do the show in the small room off the second floor rehearsal space which contained a large Sony color television. This, and the one in the guard’s station in the lobby, were the only TV’s in the place comfortably watchable by civilians. There were several guards, but I most remember an older black man named Henry.
The first day I was at the set and saw the coffin, I was afraid of it—I remember it sent me all the way to the other side of the studio. It seemed somehow dangerous to have a coffin in the room. Rather like as
king for trouble. Jonathan Frid often complained that the coffin was tiny, but I remember it being huge—a leviathan of meaning that none of the adults who worked around it seemed to mind. The second or third time I saw it, I got used to it, but I was always aware when I was in the room with it—it changed the day slightly, whenever I saw it in person.
As I got older I was even allowed on the floor a few times during taping, a privilege so intense I remember being afraid the boom microphones would pick up my pounding heart as I stood there, watching them film and trying not to breathe.
At the time, I thought the studio was preposterously large. Habitués of New York nightlife can, at this writing, go to the disco Red Zone in Manhattan, and see the space for themselves. Only much later, when I walked onto the One Life To Live set for the first time during my job on that show, did I realize that by any standards, the Dark Shadows studio was, comparatively, very small indeed. It was a dark, cavernous space, two stories high, covered with girders and catwalks and soundproofing. The most interesting thing, perhaps were the floors—walking along, one would cross over fake wood planking, and then fake stone, and then fake grass, and then fake marble. Because Dark Shadows was Dark Shadows, the sets were not your basic rooms. The living room was the only permanent set, rarely taken down. At the time I thought it was huge, and envied any house with secret passageways. In fact, I began to draw buildings in my spare time, maps of houses with elaborate secret passages.
The cameras fascinated me—behemoths on huge triangular-wheeled platforms that had to weigh a ton each, yet seemed to glide at the slightest push of the cameramen. The centerpost of each was a hydraulic press that raised and lowered silently and effortlessly. The cameras themselves were a fascinating amalgam of high technology parts rigged with dashes of black electricians tape. The lenses were huge, perfectly clear glass—anything so round and perfect had to be rare, valuable and inordinately expensive—I remember being terrified of knocking into one, getting a smudge or fingerprint on it to mar its pristine condition. I remember thinking the lenses were objects so intensely precise, important and expensive that throughout their entire worklives—from factory birth to eventual replacement—no one would ever touch them. This thought for some reason fired my imagination—the stuff at Tiffanys might have been valuable, but this was beyond value and into some stratosphere of Science.
If the lens in front was forbiddingly scientific, the back of the camera, where the technician stood, was fascinatingly homey. For one thing, the viewpiece was a book-sized television screen, usually with an eye shade taped over it—I always wondered if they could get other channels on those screens, aside from an image of whatever the camera was pointed at. If you did get other channels, of course, having one of these babies in your room at home would have been even more practical. Below the screen were all sorts of serious looking knobs and buttons and widgets, all with unnamed but Tremendously Important Functions, all aching to be twiddled and turned and pressed. Usually there was a pad next to the viewer/monitor, on which the cameraman would jot Tremendously Important Technical Things with a pencil. When not in use, the pencil was jammed haphazardly into the hood of the viewing monitor in a dashing, rakish manner that I found nothing short of shocking.
I remember being asked what I wanted for Christmas, that first year, and knowing that what I really wanted, beyond anything else, was a Dark Shadows Camera. I even pictured it in my room—though I knew that without the rest of the studio, I couldn’t do my own show, which I admit was the logical extension of any fantasy involving having a million dollar professional quality video camera in your childhood bedroom.
But if I couldn’t have a camera, I’d have settled happily for a microphone boom—though I remember regretting it would have never fit in my bedroom. A gangly black martian-looking monster that took two men to operate, it was at once a primitive, yet remarkably precise machine. A three-foot high platform on wheels supported the boom man, who operated the crane-like telescoping boom arm. At the end of the arm was a microphone that could spin, controlled by the boom man, seemingly in any axis. (It is this microphone that one sees occasionally on the old show, ducking into the top of the television frame periodically like an unnoticed household UFO.) Not as cool as a camera, then, but certainly a wonderful addition any schoolboy’s list of fantasy Christmas presents.
As I got older, the cast and crew all got to know me. Sometimes I would watch the taping in the control room. At first this sanctum sanctorum filled with delicate, complicated and incredibly sophisticated equipment was the most forbidding place on earth. These were the glory days of NASA, and the Dark Shadows control room was, to my mind, as reverent a shrine to technology as the main room of the Houston Space Center. It was smaller, but it was ours, and I was always amazed and glad to be there. It was always twilight in that room. Against one wall, floor to ceiling, was a bank of television screens. In front of that was a long table filled with knobs, switches, mixers and sliders and levers. Behind that, also the length of the room, was a raised observer’s platform. The chairs were big and swiveled. This was Dan’s real lair. During dress rehearsal and taping, feeds from the three cameras appeared on the wall of screens from the studio down the hall. Dan, Bob Costello, music director Sybil Weinberger, technical director Jake Lupatkin, and the director, among others, would sit in the room studying the wall of monitors. The show was edited live, with the director sitting at the long table surrounded by the others, watching the actions on the monitors and calling “Camera one—Camera three—Camera One—Camera two—and Fade Out.” Jake pushed the appropriate buttons, ensuring that the feed from the selected cameras went onto the rolling video tape. A simple action, with a staff of a dozen and a room full of millions of dollars worth of machinery to carry it out.
Off to the side was a smaller room loaded to the brim with banks of a different type of machinery. If the main room was NASA, this smaller area was more like the crammed, dark control room of a hunter-killer submarine. The machines in this room were man-height and had rows upon rows of buttons, knobs, and switches. Workers sat in chairs facing the console that had rows of switches, various meters and, on each one, a round, black, radar-like oscilloscope screen. I took to spending time in this room because the energy level was not as furiously paced as in the control room. I was in less people’s way there, and it had a glass wall that allowed me to watch Dan and the others frenetically punching buttons. One day one of the men bade me sit down in front of one of the machines and showed me buttons to push that altered the configuration of the ever-changing squiggly yellow-green line of light on the oscilloscope. Then he told me that I could consider this my machine. I could come and punch buttons on it any time, as long as I didn’t punch buttons on any other machine. From that day on, I had a meaning, a function, a purpose. I sat in the Dark Shadows studio control room and punched my little buttons and made the squiggle of the oscilloscope change, and all was right with the world.
The prop section amazed me. To a 10- and 11 year old, it was a big, messy world of wonders—an entire forest in a room, with paintings on the walls and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. It was like an antique store filled with familiar relics. The trees and bushes were on little crosses that served as bases. I remember one Christmas season they decorated one bush with seasonal paraphernalia, but most of the time the propmen were pretty blase about the empire of neat stuff they controlled.
Upstairs, in the rehearsal space and dressing rooms, the walls were white, the linoleum floor was white, and the air-conditioner blasted frigid air. My memory of that studio is that it was always cold. I remember the drapes of my mother’s dressing room windows—white with the ABC logo all over them—that looked out over the schoolyard across the street.
The upstairs rehearsal space was a big, white, mirrored room with a table and folding chairs, a chalkboard on one wall and a poster of Bela Lugosi as Dracula on another. At various times of the day, Dan and the director would sit down with the actors and give notes. I was al
ways fascinated by this process because Dan was such a forceful personality, and he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. He would cut the scripts ruthlessly—I always watched him pencil his way through pages of script with a lot of mixed emotions. I had seen my Dad write those scripts, had read most of them, and didn’t understand how anybody could so callously edit chunks out. I remember shyly asking my father if he knew that Dan was doing this. Of course he did. I asked him how he felt about it, and he paused. “It’s Dan’s show,” he said. “Sometimes he cuts good stuff, sometimes he makes it better. But it’s his show, and he does what he wants.”
Often I went to the studio after school, or piano lessons, or soccer practice. Usually, though not always, there was a small throng of people waiting at the door for a glimpse of Jonathan Frid or one of the other actors. As I went in, someone would always ask “Hey, how come he gets to get in?” I always found myself on the side of the fans in this case; I didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t come in, too—at least in a small, non disruptive group, once or twice, just to see how everything worked.
After a while, our lives began to revolve around the show. I would come home from school, and find the writers in our red living room, with Dad lying on his back on the floor, pulling his eyebrows and worrying aloud about character motivation. Gordon Russell was a rumpled, affable man, funny and sweet. After Dark Shadows ended, he and my father went on to write One Life To Live. Ron Sproat was thin, dapper—a bright man. Dan Curtis was often at those storymeetings, as well—he was always bigger than life.
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 3
