One of my first jobs was collating Dark Shadows scripts for my father. In those days before computers, the scripts were all typed on carbon paper. When Dad finished a script, he would call me in, and I would get 50-cents to deal out the five copies into scripts. Each script was topped with a synopses and a title page. I remember Dad hated doing the synopses with a passion, regarding them as a loathsome chore, and a waste of time. Once he had written the script, he wanted to eat dinner, hang out with his family—do anything rather than recapture the plot points of the script he’d just finished. He also hated doing the title pages, with their lists of characters and sets. This job he sometimes also farmed out to me. As a child, I would go through the script, scribble down which actors and sets were included in that episode, and type them up on Dad’s crotchety old gray IBM electric. For this—actual typing—I was paid a dollar. I remember asking him if I could also do the synopsies, since he hated doing them so much, but he insisted it was not a task he could avoid, though he often left them for the next morning, and then did them really quickly as I was preparing to go to school.
I also made 50-cents every time I cued my mother with her lines. I would be in my room, doing my homework, and the call would ring out—“Matt, come cue me!” I would gratefully stop conjugating French Verbs or getting math problems wrong and go hang out in the bedroom. I would read the various parts in her scenes while Mom would run through her lines. Sometimes we laughed a lot during these sessions, when the show was particularly bizarre. Other times she would be in every scene, and it would just be a lot of solid work for her.
There was a quota of actors Dark Shadows was budgeted per week, a number the writers tried manfully not to exceed. Because of this budgetary constraint, after a particularly complex week the writers were occasionally left with only a few characters in a script. In one episode, my mother ran around virtually alone, haunted by unseen forces—with a lot of lines to speak.
Nothing is so tight as a theater or television ensemble company in full swing, and Dark Shadows was no exception. Several intense friendships were born in those days. Nancy Barrett and my mother shared a longstanding comradeship. Nancy often sought my mother’s advice on her affairs of the heart. Nancy is a petite Oklahoma girl with a great sense of humor, and we had a running thing for years where I would give her my old shirts—she liked them, and they fit her, so I gave them to her. Thayer David was a charming man we saw often. Lara Parker was extravagantly beautiful, to my adolescent eyes, and profoundly shy. My family had a pug named Thing. Lara had a pug named Rosie. Thing, being an apartment dog, was still a virgin at the ripe old age of six, and one day in the studio, my mother and Lara made a pact to try to end that dilemma by getting these two fine examples of Pugdom together, in hopes of making more, smaller pugs. First we tried it at Lara’s apartment, where for various reasons it didn’t work.
When Rosie next came into heat, she came to stay with us for a few days. Thing, who was in many ways shy, was at first unexcited at this frisky girl pug invading his territory. In fact, for a couple of days, nothing happened—they sniffed around each other, they played a little, but that was all. We were beginning to wonder if perhaps Thing needed lessons in species reproduction. Then, one afternoon, Mom took the dogs on a walk. She was standing with the two pugs in front of a very large, very busy Midtown Manhattan tourist hotel when a couple of high-school aged tourists came up and asked her for her autograph. She pushed the leashes onto one arm, signed and chatted with the fans. While she was talking, a tour bus pulled up in front of the hotel, its door directly adjacent to where my mother stood. The door opened, and an entire high-school cheerleading squad began to decamp. Mom gulped nervously as a buzz went through the crowd getting off—“That’s Grayson Hall! That’s Julia from Dark Shadows!” Just what she needed—48 teenaged girls from the midwest, seeing their first celebrity in New York. And then she looked down.
Thing had mounted Rosie.
Lightninglike, she tried to recall everything she thought she knew about the passions of canine sexuality. She searched her mind and came up with a figure—45 minutes. That’s how long, she remembered, dogs take to make love. The phrase “They get locked together” seared across her brain. She looked at the ever-thickening clot of teenage girls staring at her, fumbling for autograph pens, pointing nervously at the dogs.
She looked back down. Thing and Rosie had not yet, as the phrase went, “locked.”
The nearest crosslight was blinking yellow, about to turn red. She thrust back the autographs she had signed, tore the dogs apart and ran as fast as she could across the street, heading home. She ran through the lobby, got her keys out in the elevator, ran down the hall, keyed open the door and thrust the two pugs back into the safety and security of the apartment. She took the leashes off and sat back, waiting for the action to start.
The pugs found places on the floor about eight feet from each other, flopped themselves down, and stared up at her, utterly uncomprehending. After a while, Thing got up, stretched, and went to take a nap in the other room.
Rosie, in due course, was given back, unpregnant, to Lara Parker. No puppies were born. Thing, obviously deeply traumatized by the brutal and violent interruption of his first sexual experience, died, many years later, a virgin.
Even though I knew Jonathan Frid, to be a gentle and funny man, I was always tripped up by the fact that he was, indeed, a star. Perhaps it was the way in which he inhabited the role of Barnabas; even though I knew everything about how the show was put together, Jonathan Frid always intimidated me a bit—almost as if I wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t a vampire.
David Henesy was a great kid. Slightly older than me, he was quite nice when I was at the Studio. Nevertheless, I will admit I envied him a bit. My mother had a job on this show; my father had a job on this show; all our friends had jobs on this show. Even other kids had jobs on this show—everyone in the world seemed to have a job on this show, except me. Some part of me never really gave up hope. One afternoon when I was eleven or twelve, I was hanging out in Mom’s dressing room. Her room was across the hall from the make-up room, over which Vinnie Loscalzo presided like a squat, happy Buddha. Vinnie had to stay until taping was done, in case anyone needed their make-up fixed. The upstairs, however, tended to be a bit quiet that late in the day. Vinnie was a kind and funny man, and this day must have been particularly quiet, because at some point he called me over, patted his make-up chair and told me to get in. I did, and he proceeded to spend an hour making me into a monster. He aged my face, gave me pointed ears, a long, dangerous nose, wicked eyebrows and a widow’s peak, and he aged my hands by making them all wrinkly and gnarled. Then he sent me out into the world.
There were a few fans at the door of the studio that day. They asked me if I was in the show, and I had to admit I wasn’t. One of them took a picture, and then I stalked off towards Ninth Avenue, where I spent a goodly amount of time frightening younger shoolchildren and making adults laugh. When I got home, my parents, for some reason, didn’t have a camera, so we didn’t get a picture of me. I tried to convince my parents to let me sleep in the make-up so I could go to school the next morning as a monster, but finally the adults won and my monster face disappeared under the administration of liberal amounts of cold cream.
Somewhere out there is a fan with one picture from Dark Shadows that he or she can’t explain. If anybody has that picture, I’d be a happy camper to actually see how I looked.
In seventh grade shop class, all the other kids carved trays, bowls and salad implements. I elected to carve a small wooden coffin. The shop teacher, a Germanic gentleman with missing fingers and a passionate sense of what was proper in education—and what was not—vigorously opposed the idea, and assumed that he could make me not do it. When I pointed out to him that my parents were in Dark Shadows, he saw he had no choice but to let me go ahead with the project. But he never liked it, not one bit, and only grudgingly answered my questions about how to carve the lid so it would fit.
The summer camp I went to was associated with my school, and as such, tended to frown on the watching of television. Because I was missing the show, I requested copies of the script summaries be sent to me. And they were, at sporadic intervals. When they arrived, for a moment I was the most popular guy in the bunk. Then people would try to read them and they made so little sense—divorced from the show or the script—that they were actually pretty funny. Being a relatively straight-laced little kid, I hated it when anybody laughed at my parent’s work.
But the fact was, even I could see they made no sense.
One September evening, in the last year of the run of Dark Shadows, I went to the studio around six to pick up Mom for her birthday dinner. As we were passing through the guard’s atrium in the lobby, the six o’clock news was on, and I learned that Jimi Hendrix had died. I remember the newscaster ended his filmed report by closing Hendrix’ guitar case. That image stayed in my mind for years, more symbolic of death than all the closing coffins I’d ever seen on Dark Shadows.
When Dark Shadows went off the air, I remember hearing that Gordon Russell was going to be an extra, appearing as the second footman, on camera in the last episode. (Gordon, who had been an actor, enjoyed the experience so much that he renamed his business company Second Footman Ltd.) My first thought was: why didn’t Dad go on the air in costume in the last episode. My second thought was: why couldn’t I?
Of course, I didn’t ask out loud. But I thought it, and when that episode aired, I watched it, and thought there goes my last chance to ever work on Dark Shadows. It’s amazing how wrong we can be, sometimes.
Mom died in 1985, of lung cancer. She had not smoked in eight years, but she had smoked heavily for most of her life before she quit. Her death was nasty, brutal, and, fortunately, short—she only had six months of sickness. After she died I got back to work on my first novel, Nightmare Logic, which was published in paperback by Bantam in August of 1989. That fall, I was in Los Angeles visiting my father, who had taken a job as associate headwriter on the soap opera Santa Barbara. One night we went to dinner with Dan Curtis and his wife Norma at an Italian restaurant on Wilshire. I hadn’t seen them in some time—they hadn’t changed a bit. Dan looks like something out of Greek mythology—half man, half bull. He has curly hair and a strong profile and a barrel chest—a very powerful man. His wife, Norma, is more fineboned, an attractive woman with a sharp sense of humor and a lionness’ protectiveness of her husband. As we dined on veal chops and fish, Dan said he was considering bringing Dark Shadows back, as a nighttime episodic show. Was Dad interested? Dad was up to his neck in work, but nonetheless, I saw something in his eyes light up at the thought of doing Shadows again. I, meanwhile, had brought a copy of my novel as a gift for Dan. I presented it, and Dan asked me: if Dark Shadows were to happen, how would I feel about being a part of it? I gulped, thought about my commitment to Bantam for the second novel, which I was hard at work on. I wouldn’t have interrupted that novel for any television show—but this wasn’t any television show, this was Dark Shadows. I said I’d be fascinated.
That fall, MGM gave the project more and more support, and Dan and Dad began to seriously negotiate. They came to an agreement, then they came to a disagreement, and then Dan hired two totally unknown writers. They handed in a script that didn’t satisfy Dan, and he called my father back. Again they reached an agreement. Dan told my father he had read my novel, and definitely wanted me on the team. Was I busy? Did I still want to be involved?
Dad said, “He’s in New York. Call him up and ask.”
Dan called, and named a pleasantly large sum of money. I said yes. He told me to be in his office in Los Angeles the following Wednesday. I found somebody to watch my cat for what I thought would be six weeks, and flew to LA.
I had worked with my father before, for a year and a half at One Life To Live. I found him to be a brilliant writer and a sometimes difficult boss. I had said at the end of that rather dramatic period that though I loved him a lot, but for father/son reasons I would never work with him again—now here I was breaking, if not a solid vow, at least a damn good rule of thumb. On the other hand, Dad had continued to work with Dan long past Dark Shadows, and on into the mid-70s. There had come a time when, because of certain creative differences, my father had said he wouldn’t work with Dan again, though they had remained friends throughout the years. Yet, Dad was back.
Such was the power of the idea of Dark Shadows that I joined the team.
I arrive at MGM with my father to write Dark Shadows. Dad and I take the elevator up to Dan’s suite of offices, and my first day begins with an attempt to read all the material thus far written for the new show. I’m in the office, hanging out with Dad and Ruth Kennedy, Dan’s business affairs expert, and DeAnn Heline, Dan’s production associate, trying to catch up. Dan comes in periodically, but he is occupied with lots and lots of projects, of which we are only one. Dan and I do little more than say hello to each other that first day.
At the end of my second day on the job, Dan yells out my name, and invites me into his office for a conversation. He is exuberant, grinning from ear to ear—he is delighted to have me on this project. He regards it as an opportunity for him to see if I have what it takes to do nighttime (my television credits thus far only having been daytime). He seems delighted and at peace with the world—and the phone rings. It is someone in advertising calling about another of his projects—and giving him trouble. Dan gets the offending shmo on the phone, and soundly and roundly critiques his ability to do his job. The tirade is flawless—it may be one of the most commanding telephone performances I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of my mother in full cry—an intense amount of drama all channelled into one small black funnel. Over the course of 20 minutes—his fury starting at a high pitch and mounting ever higher—Dan spins a gossamer web of argument around his unseen adversary, and then turns the strands into irrefutable iron and cudgels his victim brutally with the shards of his own shattered illogic. Whatever kind of afternoon the poor ad man was having before the phone call started, his whole day was shot by the end of it. Finally, in full throttle fury, Dan ended the phone call by saying: “The day you advertising people run the operation is the day the film business rolls up and dies.” He slammed down the phone, looked over at me, grinned a devilish grin and said “So anyway, kid, it’s great having ya out here.”
You can’t help but like a guy like that.
Over the next five months, I had occasion to watch Dan Curtis fight the good fight over and over. I never saw him lose.
Dan got my father and myself busy going through the old episodes—both scripts and synopses—looking at all the various plots with an eye toward what we could pull out and use and what would have trouble making the transition from late-60s daytime to early-90s nighttime. Dan had what he thought was the entire original show in script form, in a hundred light purple three-ring binders that took up one wall of the office. His scripts were Xeroxed from the UCLA collection.. At first, their film and television library was less than accommodating about letting their precious collection of Dark Shadows scripts be copied for this purpose, but Dan brought them around.
The early scripts did not have synopses. Later episodes had brief ones and, as the show grew more complex, the synopses expanded from a half-page to two-and-a-half pages. These were the selfsame synopses that had been incomprehensible to me and my friends at camp.
Obviously my father had not been the only Dark Shadows writer who hated doing synopses. Often, in their haste, storypoints were simplified to the point of incoherence. At the time, the writers would have howled with laughter at the idea that these would be important in 1990. Now, of course, Dad and I were suffering the effects of this hasty attitude.
While going through the scripts, Dad occasionally reeled—he found one episode that he remembered writing, that had been taped on his birthday. He sat for a long time thinking about his birthday that year, what restaurant we had gone to, what life had been
like. It made him miss my mother considerably.
I found the old Dark Shadows scripts fascinating. Every page was a revelation, a memory jogged, an event brought back to mind. I occasionally write poetry and sometimes I write about my childhood. One day, while going through my poems, I realized that all the ones that mentioned my childhood made reference to the year when I was nine years old. Often I wondered what event happened when I was nine that was still striking sparks in me. While working my way through my thirtieth or fortieth Dark Shadows script, I suddenly came to an abrupt realization. I turned back to the title page, and discerned that these scripts were a giant clue to that mysterious ninth year that had so puzzled me in my poems. Here was a daily record of what my father and mother were doing on such and such a date, at ABC Studio 16 on 53th Street. My mother said these words written by my father and we had talked about the plot behind these words over the dinner table. At that time, I recalled we were eating a lot of steak Diane, a steak dish cooked in cognac. My father would flame the cognac in the kitchen, and I remembered the green, and then yellow, of the kitchen walls, the way the sauce sizzled under the flame, what my school homework was during that period, and a thousand other things. The scripts plunged me into the world of my own past at every turn.
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 4
