by Marvin Kaye
over, and been confronted with his own irrelevance. His true death was just a
formality.
And He was not coming back.
A woodcut image of Dracula appeared on television. She turned the sound up.
The newscast had reached the entertainment roundup, which in this town came
before major wars on other continents. A fluffy-haired woman in front of the
Hollywood sign was talking about the latest studio craze, Dracula pictures. A race
was on between Universal and Paramount to get their biopics of the Count to the
screens. At Universal, director Joel Schumacher and writer-producer Jane Wagner
had cast John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in St. George's Fire; at MGM, producer
Steven Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper had Peter Coyote and Karen Allen in
Vampirgeist. There was no mention of Orson Welles—or, unsurprisingly, Boris
Adrian—but another familiar name came up.
John Alucard.
"Hollywood dealmakers have often been characterised as bloodsuckers," said
the reporter, "but John Alucard is the first actually to be one. Uniquely, this
vampire executive is involved in both these competing projects, as a packager of
the Universal production and as associate producer of the MGM film. Clearly, in a
field where there are too few experts to go around, John Alucard is in demand.
Unfortunately, Mr. A—as Steven Spielberg calls him—is unable because of his
image impairment to grant interviews for broadcast media, but he has issued a
statement to the effect that he feels there is room for far more than two versions of
the story he characterises as 'the most important of the last two centuries.' He
goes on to say, 'There can be no definitive Dracula, but we hope we shall be able
to conjure a different Dracula for every person.' For decades, Hollywood stayed
away from this hot subject but, with the Francis Coppola epic of a few years ago
cropping up on Best of All Time lists, it seems we are due, like the Londoners of
1885, for a veritable invasion of Draculas. This is Kimberley Wells, for Channel 6
KDHB Update News, at the Hollywood sign."
She switched the television off. The whole world, and Orson Welles, knew
now what John Alucard was doing, but the other part of her original
commission—who he was and where he came from—was still a mystery. He had
come from the East, with a long line of credit. A source had told her he had
skipped New York ahead of an investigation into insider-trading or junk bonds,
but she might choose to put that down to typical Los Angeles cattiness. Another
whisper had him living another life up in Silicon Valley as a consultant on
something hush-hush President Reagan's people were calling the Strategic Defense
Initiative, supposedly Buck Rogers stuff. Alucard could also be a Romanian shoe
salesman with a line of great patter who had quit his dull job and changed his name
the night he learned his turning vampire wasn't going to take in the long run and set
out to become the new Irving Thalberg before he rotted away to dirt.
There must be a connection between the moviemaking mystery man and the
high-school librarian. Alucard and Gorse. Two vampires in California. She had
started asking around about one of them, and the other had sent a puppet to warn
her off.
John Alucard could not be Count Dracula.
Not yet, at least.
On her way up into the Hollywood Hills, to consult the only real magician she
knew, she decided to call on Jack Martin, to see if he wanted to come along on the
trip. The movie mage would interest him.
The door of Martin's shack hung open.
Her heart skipped. Loose manuscript pages were drifting out of Martin's home,
catching on the breeze, and scuttling along Beverly Glen Boulevard, sticking on
the manicured hedges of the million-dollar estates, brushing across the whitepainted faces of lawn jockeys who had been coal black until Sidney Poitier made a
fuss.
She knocked on the door, which popped a hinge and hung free.
"Jack?"
Had Gorse gotten to him?
She ventured inside, prepared to find walls dripping red and a ruined corpse
lying in a nest of torn-up screenplays.
Martin lay on a beat-up sofa, mouth open, snoring slightly. He was no more
battered than usual. A Mexican wrestling magazine was open on his round tummy.
"Jack?"
He came awake, blearily.
"It's you," he said, cold.
His tone was like a silver knife.
"What's the matter?"
"As if you didn't know. You're not good to be around, Gené. Not good at all.
You don't see it, but you're a wrecker."
She backed away.
"Someone tipped off the Writers' Guild about the porno. My ticket got
yanked; my dues were not accepted. I'm off the list. I'm off all the lists. All
possible lists. I didn't get Buck Privates. They went with Lionel Fenn."
"There'll be other projects," she said.
"I'll be lucky to get Buck's Privates."
Martin had been drinking, but didn't need to get drunk to be in this despair
hole. It was where he went sometimes, a mental space like Ensenada, where he
slunk to wallow, to soak up the misery he turned into prose. This time, she had an
idea he wasn't coming back; he was going lower than ever and would end up a
beachcomber on a nighted seashore, picking broken skulls out of bloody
seaweed, trailing bare feet through ink black surf, becoming the exile king of his
own dark country.
"It just took a phone call, Gené To smash everything. To smash me. I wasn't
even worth killing. That hurts. You, they'll kill. I don't want you to be near me
when it happens."
"Does this mean our premiere date is off?"
She shouldn't have said that. Martin began crying, softly. It was a shocking
scene, upsetting to her on a level she had thought she had escaped from. He
wasn't just depressed, he was scared.
"Go away, Gené," he said.
This was not a jaunt any more. Jack Martin was as lost to her as Moondoggie,
as her license.
How could things change so fast? It wasn't the second week of January, wasn't
the Julian 1980s, but everything that had seemed certain last year, last decade, was
up for debate or thrown away.
There was a cruelty at work. Beyond Gorse.
She parked the Plymouth and walked across a lawn to a ranch-style bungalow.
A cabalist firmament of star signs decorated the mailbox.
The mage was a trim, fiftyish man, handsome but small, less a fallen angel than
a fallen cherub. He wore ceremonial robes to receive her into his sanctum
sanctorum, an arrangement of literal shrines to movie stars of the 1920s and '30s:
Theda Bara, Norma Desmond, Clara Bow, Lina Lamont, Jean Harlow, Blanche
Hudson, Myrna Loy. His all-seeing amulet contained a long-lashed black-andwhite eye, taken from a still of Rudolph Valentino. His boots were black leather
motorcycle gear, with polished chrome buckles and studs.
As a boy, the mage—Kenneth Anger to mortals of this plane—had appeared
as the Prince in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In
later life, he had become a filmmaker, but for himself not the studios (his
"underground" trilogy consisted of Scorpio Risi
ng, Lucifer Rising and Dracula
Rising), and achieved a certain notoriety for compiling Hollywood Babylon, a
collection of scurrilous but not necessarily true stories about the seamy private
lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of the screen. A disciple of Aleister
Crowley and Adrian Marcato, he was a genuine movie magician.
He was working on a sequel to Hollywood Babylon, which had been
forthcoming for some years. It was called Transylvania Babylon, and contained
all the gossip, scandal, and lurid factoid speculation that had ever circulated about
the elder members of the vampire community. Nine months ago, the manuscript
and all his research material had been stolen by a couple of acid-heads in the
employ of a pair of New Orleans-based vampire elders who were the focus of
several fascinating, enlightening, and perversely amusing chapters. Geneviève had
recovered the materials, though the book was still not published, as Anger had to
negotiate his way through a maze of injunctions and magical threats before he
could get the thing in print.
She hesitated on the steps that led down to his slightly sunken sanctum.
Incense burned before the framed pictures, swirling up to the low stucco ceiling.
"Do you have to be invited?" he asked. "Enter freely, spirit of dark."
"I was just being polite," she admitted.
The mage was a little disappointed. He arranged himself on a pile of harem
cushions and indicated a patch of Turkish carpet where she might sit.
There was a very old bloodstain on the weave.
"Don't mind that," he said. "It's from a thirteen -year-old movie extra
deflowered by Charlie Chaplin at the very height of the Roaring Twenties."
She decided not to tell him it wasn't hymenal blood (though it was human).
"I have cast spells of protection, as a precaution. It was respectful of you to
warn me this interview might have consequences."
Over the centuries, Geneviève had grown out of thinking of herself as a
supernatural creature, and was always a little surprised to run into people who still
saw her that way. It wasn't that they might not be right, it was just unusual and
unfashionable. The world had monsters, but she still didn't know if there was
magic.
"One man who helped me says his career has been ruined because of it," she
said, the wound still fresh. "Another, who was just my friend, died."
"My career is beyond ruination," said the mage. "And death means nothing. As
you know, it's a passing thing. The lead-up, however, can be highly unpleasant, I
understand. I think I'd opt to skip that experience, if at all possible."
She didn't blame him.
"I've seen some of your films and looked at your writings," she said. "It seems
to me that you believe motion pictures are rituals."
"Well put. Yes, all real films are invocations, summonings. Most are made by
people who don't realise that. But I do. When I call a film Invocation of My
Demon Brother, I mean it exactly as it sounds. It's not enough to plop a camera in
front of a ceremony. Then you only get religious television, God help you. It's in
the lighting, the cutting, the music. Reality must be banished, channels opened to
the beyond. At screenings, there are always manifestations. Audiences might not
realise on a conscious level what is happening, but they always know. Always.
The amount of ectoplasm poured into the auditorium by drag queens alone at a
West Hollywood revival of a Joan Crawford picture would be enough to embody
a minor djinni in the shape of the Bitch Queen, with a turban and razor cheekbones
and shoulder pads out to here."
She found the image appealing, but also frightening.
"If you were to make a dozen films about, say, the devil, would the Prince of
Darkness appear?"
The mage was amused. "What an improbable notion! But it has some
substance. If you made twelve ordinary films about the devil, he might seem more
real to people, become more of a figure in the culture, get talked about and put on
magazine covers. But let's face it, the same thing happens if you make one
ordinary film about a shark. It's the thirteenth film that makes the difference, that
might work the trick."
"That would be your film? The one made by a director who understands the
ritual?"
"Sadly, no. A great tragedy of magic is that the most effective must be worked
without conscious thought, without intent. To become a master mage, you must
pass beyond the mathematics and become a dreamer. My film, of the devil you
say, would be but a tentative summoning, attracting the notice of a spirit of the
beyond. Fully to call His Satanic Majesty to Earth would require a work of
surpassing genius, mounted by a director with no other intention but to make a
wonderful illusion, a von Steinberg or a Frank Borzage. That thirteenth film, a
Shanghai Gesture or a History Is Made at Night, would be the perfect ritual. And
its goaty hero could leave his cloven hoofprint in the cement outside Grauman's
Chinese."
In January 1981, Welles began filming The Other Side of Midnight
on the old Miracle Pictures lot, his first studio -shot—though
independently financed—picture since Touch of Evil in 1958, and his
first "right of final cut" contract since Citizen Kane, The ins and outs
of the deal have been assessed in entire books by Peter Bart and David
J. Skal, but it seems that Welles, after a career of searching, had found
a genuine "angel," a backer with the financial muscle to give him the
budget and crew he needed to make a film that was truly his vision but
also the self-effacing trust to let him have total artistic control of the
result.
There were nay-saying voices and the industry was already
beginning to wonder whether still in -progress auteur movies like
Michael Cimino's The Lincoln County Wars or Coppola's Dracula
follow-up One front the Heart were such a great idea, but Welles
himself denounced those runaways as examples of fuzzy thinking. As
with his very first Dracula movie script and Kane, The Other Side of
Midnight was meticulously preplanned and precosted. Forty years on
from Kane, Welles must have known this would be his last serious
chance. A boy wonder no longer, the pressure was on him to produce
a "mature masterpiece," a career book-end to the work that had topped
so many Best of All Time lists and eclipsed all his other achievements.
He must certainly have been aware of the legion of cineastes whose
expectations of a film that would eclipse the flashy brilliance of the
Coppola version were sky-rocketing. It may be that so many of
Welles's other projects were left unfinished deliberately, because their
creator knew they could never compete with the imagined masterpieces
that were expected of him. With Midnight, he had to show all his cards
and take the consequences.
The Other Side of Midnight occupied an unprecedented three
adjacent soundstages, where Ken Adam's sets for Bistritz and Borgo
Pass and the exteriors and interiors of Castle Dracula were constructed.
John Huston shaved his beard and let his moustache sprout, preparing
for the acting role of hi
s career, cast apparently because Welles
admired his predator-patriarch Noah Cross (Chinatown, 1974). It has
been rumoured that the seventy-four-year-old Huston went so far as to
have transfusions of vampire blood and took to hunting the Hollywood
night with packs of newborn vampire brats, piqued because he couldn't
display trophies of his "kills." Other casting was announced, a canny
mix of A-list stars who would have worked for scale just to be in a
Welles film, long-time associates who couldn't bear to be left out of the
adventure and fresh talent. Besides Welles (Van Helsing), the film
would star Jack Nicholson (Jonathan Harker), Richard Gere (Arthur
Holmwood), Shelley Duvall (Mina), Susan Sarandon (Lucy), Cameron
Mitchell (Renfield), Dennis Hopper (Quincey), Jason Robards (Dr.
Seward), Joseph Cotten (Mr. Hawkins), George Couloris (Mr. Swales)
and Jeanne Moreau (Peasant Woman). The three vampire brides were
Anjelica Huston, Marie-France Pisier and then-unknown Kathleen
Turner. John Williams was writing the score, Gary Graver remained
Welles's preferred cinematographer, Rick Baker promised astounding
and innovative special make-up effects and George Lucas's ILM
contracted for the optical effects.
There were other vampire movies in pre-production, other Dracula
movies, but Hollywood was really only interested in the Welles version.
Finally, it would happen.
Gates, ibid.
Geneviève parked the Plymouth near Bronson Caverns, in sight of the
Hollywood sign, and looked out over Los Angeles, transformed by distance into a
carpet of Christmas lights. MGM used to boast "more stars than there were in the
heavens," and there they were, twinkling individually, a fallen constellation. Car
lights on the freeways were like glowing platelets flowing through neon veins.
From up here, you couldn't see the hookers on Hollywood Boulevard, the endless
limbo motels and real estate developments, the lost, lonely, and desperate. You
couldn't hear the laugh track, or the screams.
It came down to magic. And whether she believed in it.
Clearly, Kenneth Anger did. He had devoted his life to rituals. A great many of
them, she had to admit, had worked. And so did John Alucard and Ernest Gorse,
vampires who thought themselves magical beings. Dracula had been another of the
