The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "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 a half 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 plume, alter egos, secret identities, anagrams, and palindromes and acrostics. Just like actors. A holdover from the Byzantine mind-set, 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."

  "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 trace 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?"

  "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 civilisation and the sun will turn into a huge red fireball and burn even you from the face of the earth."

  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 multimillion 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, Gene. 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 tophat.

  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 Writers' 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's 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 sundown."

  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.

  Short of forcing her way into Alucard'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 every 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 multinational 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 setup, 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.

  In an interview in the Reporter, Alucard said, "The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money." A lot of execs, and not a few directors and writers, found his a refreshing and invigorating stance, though Geneviève had the impression Alucard was parroting someone else's grand theory. If he truly believed what he said, and was not just laying down something the studios' corporate owners wanted to hear, then John Alucard did not sound like someone who would happily want to be in business with Orson Welles. Apart from anything else, his manifesto was a 1980s rewrite, at five times the length with in-built repetition to get through to the admass morons at the back of the hall, of "showmanship, not genius."

  The only thing she couldn't find out was what his projects really were. Besides Welles's Dracula, which wasn't mentioned by anyone she had talked with, and the long-gestating shows he was working with senior production partners, he had a half dozen other irons in the fire. Directors and stars were attached, budgets set, start dates announced, but no titles ever got mentioned, and the descriptions in the trades—"intense drama," "romantic comedy"—were hardly helpful. That was interesting and unusual. John Alucard was making a splash, waves radiating outwards, but surely he eventually would have to say what the pictures were. Or had that become the least important part of the package? An agent at CAA told her that for men like Alucard, the art was in the deal not on the screen.

  That did worry her.

  Could it be that there wasn't actually a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? The man was a vampire, but was he also a phantom? No photographs existed, of course. Everyone had a secondhand description, always couched as a casting suggestion: a young Louis Jourdan, a smart Jack Palance, a rough-trade David Niven. It was agreed that the man was European, a long time ago. No one had any idea how long he had been a vampire, even. He could be a newborn, fresh-killed and risen last year, or a centuried elder who had changed his face a dozen times. His name always drew the same reaction: excitement, enthusiasm, fear. There was a sense that John Alucard was getting things on the road, and that it'd be a smart career move to get close to him, to be ready to haul out of the station with him.

  She cruised across sandy tarmac into the trailer park. The seafood restaurant was doing a little New Year's Day business. She would be thirsty soon.

  Someone sat on the stairs of her trailer, leaning back against her door, hands loose in his lap, legs in chinos, cowboy boots.

  Someone dead.

  Throughout Welles's career, Dracula remained an idée fixe. The Welles-Mankiewicz script was RKO property, and the studio resisted Welles's offer to buy it back. They set their asking price at the notional but substantial sum accountants reckoned had been lost on the double debacle of Ambersons and the unfinished South American project, It's All True.

  When Schaefer, Welles's patron, was removed from his position as Vice-President in Charge of Production and replaced by Charles Koerner, there was serious talk of putting the script into production through producer Val Lewton's unit, which had established a reputation for low-budget supernatural dramas with Cat People (1942). Lewton got as far as having DeWitt Bodeen and then Curt Siodmak take runs at further drafts, scaling the script down to fit a straitjacket budget. Jacques Tourneur was attached to direct, though editor Mark Robson was considered when Tourneur was promoted to A pictures. Stock players were assigned supporting roles: Tom Conway (Dr. Seward), Kent Smith (Jonathan Harker), Henry Daniell (Van Helsing), Jean Brooks (Lucy), Alan Napier (Arthur Holmwood), Skelton Knaggs (Renfield), Elizabeth Russell (Countess Marya Dolingen), Sir Lancelot (a calypso-singing coachman). Simone Simon, star of Cat People, was set for Mina, very much the focus of Lewton's take on the story, but the project fell through because RKO were unable to secure their first and only choice of star, Boris Karloff, who was committed to Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway.

  In 1944, RKO sold the Welles-Mankiewicz script, along with a parcel of set designs, to 20th Century-Fox. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck offered Welles the role of Dracula, promising Joan Fontaine and Olivia dc Havilland for Mina and Lucy, suggesting Tyrone Power (Jonathan), George Sanders (Arthur), John Carradine (Quincey) and Laird Cregar (Van Helsing). This Dracula would have been a follow-up to Fox's successful Welles-Fontaine Jane Eyre (1943), and Welles might have committed if Zanuck had again
assigned weak-willed Robert Stevenson, allowing Welles to direct in everything but credit. However, on a project this "important," Zanuck would consider only two directors; John Ford had no interest—sparing us John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, and John Agar as brawling, boozing, fearless vampire slayers—so it inevitably fell to Henry King, a specialist in molasses-slow historical subjects like Lloyd's of London (1936) and Brigham Young (1940). King, a plodder who had a brief flash of genius in a few later films with Gregory Peck, had his own, highly developed, chocolate box style and gravitas, and was not a congenial director for Welles, whose mercurial temperament was unsuited to methods he considered conservative and dreary. The film still might have been made, since Welles was as ever in need of money, but Zanuck went cold on Dracula at the end of the war when the Count was moving into his Italian exile.

  Fox wound up backing Prince of Foxes (1949), directed by King, with Power and Welles topping the cast, shot on location in Europe. A lavish bore, enlivened briefly by Welles's committed Cesare Borgia, this suggests what the Zanuck Dracula might have been like. Welles used much of his earnings from the long shoot to pour into film projects made in bits and pieces over several years: the completed Othello (1952), the unfinished Don Quixote (begun 1955) and, rarely mentioned until now, yet another Dracula. El conde Dracula, a French-Italian-Mexican-American-Irish-Liechtensteinian-British-Yugoslav-Moroccan-Iranian coproduction, was shot in snippets, the earliest dating from 1949, the latest from 1972.

  Each major part was taken by several actors, or single actors over a span of years. In the controversial edit supervised by the Spaniard Jesus Franco—a second-unit director on Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966)—and premiered at Cannes in 1997, the cast is as follows: Akim Tamiroff (Van Helsing), Micheál MacLiammóir (Jonathan), Paola Mori (Mina), Michael Redgrave (Arthur), Patty McCormick (Lucy), Hilton Edwards (Dr. Seward), Mischa Auer (Renfield). The vampire brides are played by Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Cloutier, and Katina Paxinou, shot in different years on different continents. There is no sight of Francisco Reiguera, Welles's Quixote, cast as a skeletal Dracula, and the Count is present only as a substantial shadow voiced (as are several other characters) by Welles himself. Much of the film runs silent, and a crucial framing story, explaining the multinarrator device, was either never filmed or shot and lost. Jonathan's panicky exploration of his castle prison, filled with steam like the Turkish bath in Othello, is the most remarkable, purely Expressionist scene Welles ever shot. But the final ascent to Castle Dracula, with Tamiroff dodging patently papier-mâché falling boulders and wobbly zooms into and out of stray details hardly seems the work of anyone other than a fumbling amateur.