by Marvin Kaye
he had always wanted to make Dracula. Now, it seemed, he was acting on the
impulse. It shouldn't have, but it frightened her a little. She was in two minds about
how often that story should be told.
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939, having negotiated a
two-picture deal as producer-director-writer-actor with George
Schaefer of RKO Pictures. Drawing on an entourage of colleagues
from the New York theatre and radio, he established Mercury
Productions as a filmmaking entity. Before embarking on Citizen Kane
(1941) and
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles developed
other properties: Nicholas Blake's just-published anti-Fascist thriller The
Smiler with a Knife (1939), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and
Stoker's Dracula (1897). Like the Conrad, Dracula was a novel Welles
had already done for the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio series (July
11,1938). A script was prepared (by Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and,
uncredited, John Houseman), sets were designed, the film cast, and
"tests"—the extent of which have never been revealed—shot, but the
project was dropped.
The reasons for the abandonment of
Count Dracula remain
obscure. It has been speculated that RKO was 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's 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's Lost Draculas."
Video Watchdog No. 23 May-July 1994
Welles did not so much live in the bungalow as occupy it. She recognised 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 realised he must have been
partly 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 straightbacked gothic chair. It gave her a memory flash, of hours spent in churches when
she was a warm girl. She wanted to fidget.
Welles plopped 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 head
scarf.
A pause.
Welles grinned expansively. Geneviève realised 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 on-screen 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 brain? 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 reme
mbered—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 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.
