Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

“Namely, reconciliation. Here, Frederick, give me back the photo. See this card attached to the back. The skull and crossbones on it was the official insignia of Ye Royal G. G., a nod to Tampa’s history as a haven for buccaneers, a nod to its annual Gasparilla Festival. Three months before Rondo died we made plans to come home in February to see the mock pirate invasion of the old port city. Little did I know that Rondo would join that assault in a one-man ship exactly the size of a coffin.”

  FLASHBACK (1945)—A HOLLYWOOD ROAD—NIGHT

  Once beyond bit parts in his films of the late 1930s/early 1940s—an ugly face in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a leper in The Moon and Sixpence, a moll-abusing freebooter in the Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate—RONDO HATTON began playing villainous lunks at the dispatch of smarter guys who befriend or patronize him for their own purposes. In House of Horrors, his screen credit, superimposed on his misshapen face emerging from the dark, reads

  Introducing

  RONDO HATTON

  as THE CREEPER

  Introducing. As if he has sprung full blown from Boris Karloff’s forehead, or the smoky bowels of an Eastern European golem factory. As if he hasn’t already essayed the part of the Hoxton Creeper in a deft Sherlock Holmes adventure, with Basil Rathbone, called The Pearl of Death. As if he never existed to the world at large until reeled into shambling visibility by the camera work of Maury Gertsman.

  Coming home from a prerelease showing of House of Horrors at director Jean Yarbrough’s place, Rondo and Mabel joke about this credit and his belated birth as a movie star—if only of cheap Universal programmers that in less than a year the studio will jettison as antithetical to its strategy of luring the affluent postwar public away from bowling and their newfangled television sets.

  “I liked how your lip imperceptibly twitches in that moody opening shot,” says Mabel in their late-model Packard.

  “Yeah,” says Rondo.

  Mabel says, “You can talk like a grown-up now. No stupid screenwriter’s limiting you to grunts and snarls.”

  Lightning crackles above the pepper trees in the Santa Monica foothills. Rondo glances sidelong at Mabel, a look of happy menace on his face, his upper lip raised at the corner, as he mutters:

  “That lip twitch was my opinion of the word Introducing.”

  “When you acted that scene, you couldn’t even see the word, Rondo. The credits all came in postproduction.”

  “I read the screenplay and had a hunch. Unlike most of the ugly creeps I play, I can read.”

  “You always die in Universal’s programmers,” Mabel says. “Can’t they dig up a screenwriter with brains enough to imagine some other ending?”

  Rondo smiles. “I should get the girl. Get as in win, not as in choke to death.”

  “You already have a girl, remember? I just think the silly sameness of the plots would stick in your craw.”

  “Why?” says Rondo. “They play like my own life, where I do the bidding of others, like when the Army sent me to France to shoot Huns or when you talked me into coming out here and looking up Mr. King again. And, eventually, I will die.”

  “You haven’t died yet.”

  “Just a matter of time, sweetheart. Did you see me in that walking-shadow bit? That wasn’t just me walking along in those shots. That was acromegaly on the march.”

  “You’ve outlived Roosevelt,” Mabel reminds him.

  “He had twelve years on me, and poliomyelitis. Scuttlebutt has it that he was also messing around.”

  “Which you don’t do.”

  “No, ma’am. And which I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  They drive. Then Mabel says, “I’ve figured out why they call it House of Horrors, Rondo.”

  A roll of his eyeball, a flicker of his brow. Liquid rivets PING off the Packard’s cream-colored body metal. “It’s not because Martin Kosleck’s crazy sculptor gives the Creeper asylum in his studio,” Mabel says. “It’s because that stuck-up art critic pegs him dead to rights as a no-talent.”

  “So?” says Rondo.

  “So the horrors in Kosleck’s house aren’t you, big boy, but the godawful papier-mâché statuary in his studio.” Mabel folds her arms over her bosom as if she has just decoded an abstruse cosmic mystery.

  Rondo LAUGHS. The rain CLATTERS down.

  INT. MABEL HATTON’S HOUSE—THE KEEPSAKE ROOM—DAY

  MABEL

  “Frederick, come in here. I know you want to see what I’ve got in here. I don’t invite just anyone for a look-see, but you’ve gone out of your way not only to see Rondo’s last five films but to find me here in Gulf Harbors. But I won’t hand-deliver an engraved invitation. Either join me now or kindly remove yourself from the premises.

  “Ah, the Spider Woman has enticed you into her web. Let me look at you looking. The spectacle of someone else’s awe never fails to excite me. I brought all these lobby posters, stills, and tabloid clippings from L.A. when I returned to Florida for good. But not until last February, on the third anniversary of Rondo’s death, did I fix up this room as you now behold it.

  “Some acquaintances and purported friends have accused me of living in the past, of turning my den into an idolatrous shrine. Do you know what I told those impertinent folks? I told them either ‘Fuck you’ or ‘Go away,’ always suiting the squelch to the character of my tormentor. Ha!

  “I don’t see it as living in the past to commemorate one’s personal history. The past made us who we’ve become, after all, and it ought to partake of a little more glamour than a pile of broken seashells, don’t you think? ‘Remember the Alamo.’ ‘Remember the Maine.’ Should we forget that FDR pulled us through the Depression or that Hitler tried his damnedest to exterminate the Jews?

  “Maybe I’ve gone a little haywire here—your eyes say as much—but that dramatic photo of Rondo in a black fedora and black leather gloves recalls a filmmaking era at Universal that will never come again. I bought those gloves in a darling shop in North Hollywood. One afternoon in the Brown Derby, Rondo and I argued over whether we should send a copy of that shot to one of his impressionable nieces.

  “There—Rondo and Basil Rathbone. There—Rondo as a wrangler. There—Rondo as Moloch the Brute. And there—Rondo lit from below to accentuate the alleged gruesomeness of his facial features.

  “But I don’t consider this room a shrine because I neither live nor worship in here. Besides, some of the keepsakes—look at those shelves—commemorate my accomplishments. This little Santa effigy in the satin-hemmed coat? I used to make dozens of them every fall to put in L.A. department stores on consignment. And that generously cupped brassiere hanging on the wall, as if some female miler burst chest-first through the plasterboard? (Ah, the famous Frederick Coby blush again.) I patented its design in the ’30s and have drawn residuals on it in dwindling sums ever since. Without my contributions to the Hatton household, honey, Rondo wouldn’t have lasted a season in Celluloid City. And those felt dummies of the Creeper? My doing again, as I’m quite proud to say.

  “A memory room, sure. But a tomb or a shrine? Uh-uh. If it has any religious overtones at all, they spring from Rondo’s hardheaded refusal to believe in accidents and his silly conviction that the God of the Universe wanted him to star in penny-pinching Universal horror flicks. The lug believed that. And even if he wasn’t very good, he enjoyed the work—lousy scripts, the occasional insensitive cast member, cheap publicity campaigns, tyrannical seven-year contracts, and all—because he believed that.

  “Take this copy of Rondo’s Bible and let it fall open where it will. The Book of Isaiah, right? Okay. Start reading at the thumb smudge.

  “‘For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant—’ No, don’t stop. I’ll recite it with you. I know it by heart, just as Rondo did: ‘—and as a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.’

  “Good. Keep going.

  “‘He is despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows a
nd acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely, he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.’

  “More, Frederick. Don’t listen to me reciting it with you. Just keep reading.

  “‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.’ Okay. Now drop down to the chapter’s last verse and read: ‘Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death; and he was numbered with the transgressors, and bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.’ Good. Let those final words echo in you a moment, then close the book.”

  FLASHBACK (1938)—A HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION LOT—DAY

  As the first “ugly man” contestant in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Rondo, wearing no makeup to speak of, loses to CHARLES LAUGHTON, who plays the cathedral’s bellringer, Quasimodo, with the help of disfiguring latex strips and a prosthetic hump. After the filming of these bits, Rondo goes looking for Laughton, not really hoping to talk with him but simply to fulfill Mabel’s fannish request to “dig up some dirt” on the pudgy British-born star.

  There, amid a swarm of PROP MEN and EXTRAS, stands the bandy-legged gnome, with director WILLIAM DIETERLE. Rondo’s nerve almost crumples, but the reporter’s instinct that served him so well at the Tampa Tribune asserts itself and he saunters up, his hands in his back pockets, his chest thrust out like a locomotive’s cowcatcher.

  “Yes?” says Dieterle evenly.

  Rondo addresses both men: “If we’d had a contest based on the looks God gave us, I’d’ve won hands down.”

  Dieterle smiles wanly, but Laughton, who would stand at least Rondo’s height if not stooped under his artificial hump, looks up with popeyed interest.

  “Even without this painful rigging,” he says, “I’d give you a run for your money, Mr.—”

  “Hatton. Rondo Hatton.”

  “Have you ever seen me in a movie in which my countenance appeared more or less au naturel, Mr. Hatton?”

  “Sure. Mutiny on the Bounty. The Old Dark House.”

  “Then you already know that I have a face like the behind of an elephant.”

  Rondo and Laughton twinkle at each other, an exchange that Dieterle does not remark, and Rondo tactfully withdraws. A few minutes later, Laughton also leaves the set, probably to begin the arduous process of having his naked face restored to him by makeup artists George and Gordon Bau.

  INT. THE HATTONS’ BEDROOM—THAT NIGHT

  Lying in bed next to Mabel, Rondo says, “I’ll bet he’s telling his wife that today he met the ugliest living human being he’s ever seen.”

  Mabel says, “Elsa Lanchester? The bride of Frankenstein?”

  They LAUGH for ten minutes.

  An hour later, unable to sleep, Rondo sits on the edge of their bed in his satin pajama trousers flipping an Indian-head penny that he found on the set that morning. Mabel, whom he never meant to keep awake, lies beside him waiting for him to complete this arcane ritual and to rejoin her under the covers.

  Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails.

  On the seventh flip, Rondo drops the penny, and it SCREES across the floor and vanishes under a Biedermeier chest of drawers. “Crap,” says Rondo. Then, more LOUDLY, “Crap!” He GRUNTS and rises, the box springs TWANG, and Mabel says, “For Pete’s sake, Rondo, let it go, it’s only a goddamn penny.”

  “I hadn’t finished with it. It hadn’t finished with me.”

  He flings his damp pillow across the room, knocking a picture askew. Sweat waterfalls down his flanks. His temples throb. He picks up the chest of drawers by one end, toppling a regiment of bric-a-brac, and then haphazardly scoots it forward.

  He hears a SNAP, like an anklebone breaking, and drops to his knees to feel about for the penny. Mabel says he might have better luck if he turned on the light, but he tunes her out—just as, more and more often, he tunes out the dismaying news from Europe on their cathedral Philco. With hands as nerveless as rubber gloves, Rondo gropes about. Either the penny has disappeared into another dimension or it continually takes effective evasive action.

  Rondo sits back on his heels and HOWLS.

  Mabel’s hands knead the taut muscles in his shoulders. “Mr. King promised you’d find work,” she says. “It’ll come. You don’t have to decide our future on a coin toss. Talk to me, baby.”

  Rondo HOWLS.

  “Come on, baby. Come back to bed.”

  “My lucky coin!” Rondo SHOUTS, sounding rage-filled and piteously ridiculous even to himself. He cannot help it. The probability of finding work in the picture mills of Hollywood does not concern him. He has no doubts on that score. In fact, he chose to flip the coin in part because he had no fear of going unemployed.

  “Talk to me, Rondo.” Mabel massages his neck, leans into his clammy back with maternal solicitude. “Talk to me, baby.”

  He can’t. He HOWLS.

  INT. MABEL HATTON’S HOUSE—THE KEEPSAKE ROOM—DAY

  MABEL

  “Do you see how every photo—not counting the head shots, I mean—underscores the strength and brutality of his hands? Well, of course. The Creeper was supposed to strangle all his victims. Creepily enough, upon occasion Rondo couldn’t even open a jar of pickles. I had to do it for him. The thickening of his tissues, as the acromegaly cruelly progressed, trapped his nerves, particularly in his hands, rendering them as weak as a baby’s. I’d pinch the web between his thumb and index finger, and he wouldn’t really feel it, not even if I brought my nails together.

  “Not that I did that very often, just now and again, as a test. Sometimes—rarely—he registered the pinch and looked annoyed. Believe me, Frederick, I took heart from his annoyance. Maybe his faith had triggered a previously hidden immune mechanism and set him on a miraculous path to recovery. But could even a miracle counteract the fact of his overgrown bones and cartilage? Can a toad become a tadpole again, or a crippled boxer an unblemished altar boy?

  “There—Rondo with Tyrone Power. There—Rondo with Henry Fonda. There—Rondo with Gale Sondergaard. There—Rondo with Charles Laughton and Cedric Hardwicke. A life in Lotus Land had its compensations, but we never hobnobbed with any of these people.

  “Everybody—directors, actors, writers, probably even grips—segregated themselves according to the money they made. Topflight stars didn’t party with B-picture types, writers who made three hundred a week cold-shouldered the stiffs who made a century and a half, bigwigs from Warner Brothers wouldn’t think of knocking back a few with the chiefs from RKO. We didn’t party much at all, but when we did, we usually wound up with either Universal-serials people or folks from the poverty-row studios along Gower Street.

  “At one cocktail party, a hack from Omnivore Pix or some such staggered up to Rondo and me and pitched a movie idea to Rondo as if Rondo actually had some clout. The guy’d written a screenplay for a film that would require live actors and actresses to assume the roles of Disney cartoon characters—Donald O’Connor as Mickey Mouse, Deanna Durbin as Minnie, Groucho Marx as Donald Duck, Fred MacMurray as Pluto. (Live actors as cartoons, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a lamer idea.) Anyway, the hack thought Rondo would make a picture-perfect Goofy. He wanted to go out to his car for the screenplay so Rondo could show it to Mr. Dieterle or Mr. King and start the project rolling. As politely as he could, Rondo told the guy that Mr. Disney might not take the unauthorized use of his creations too kindly.

  “‘Why?’ the nutzo said. ‘None of his people will have to draw ‘em. So if Walt gets nasty, we just offer him a cut, right?’

  “Well, maybe my story doesn’t have anything obvious to do with the weakness in Rondo’s hands, but I doubt that anybody anywhere else in the world would have approached my husband with a proposition based on his alleged resemblance to
Goofy. On the other hand, lots of stars and stagehands treated Rondo well, accepting and encouraging him. Given all the depressing stuff I’ve told you about acromegaly and Rondo’s dark nights of the soul, I thought you might appreciate something … airier. I don’t want you to lose heart. I don’t—

  “What? You want to hear how he died? Really? If I were in your huaraches, Frederick, I might never want to hear it. What if I told you that on the set one day an actor pulled out a Colt pistol—not a prop—and shot Rondo point-blank in the heart. You look shocked. Of course, in all but a couple of his last films, exactly that sort of death carried Rondo off and the film itself into its closing credits. But okay, I’ll tell you quickly because Rondo’s real death happened almost as fast as a trigger squeeze, and maybe that news’ll give you solace.

  “Late in ’45, a sailor from Tampa, a guy Rondo’d met working for the Tribune, turned up in the Navy hospital in Los Angeles with pneumonia. Tom began coming over as often as he could convince his doctors that a home-broiled steak and a bull session with another Tampan would speed his cure. Well, he convinced them a lot so we saw him a lot, and since I liked Tom, too, if he couldn’t make it over, his absence haunted our house.

  “Around Christmas, Rondo had a peculiar cardiac incident while toting a plant from our house to a neighbor’s. Tom left the neighbor’s—we’d gone there ahead of Rondo—to look for him and found him on the sidewalk, a terra cotta pot shattered at his feet and an impenetrable fog in his eyes. But Rondo got better and never did stop talking about returning to Tampa in February for the Gasparilla Festival. The incident scared me, though, because acromegaly ups the risk of heart disease, and the doctors had no reliable treatment for either the symptoms or the excessive flow of hormones that produce the symptoms. They still don’t.

  “On the second of February of ’46, while I pan-fried some venison, Rondo fell in the shower. Tom had come to visit again, and he burst into the bathroom to help. Rondo perched hangdog and naked on the edge of the tub looking as white as bleached rice. I telephoned the fire department for an ambulance. Just when the driver and a medic ran through our door, Rondo died. With Tom’s help, those guys got him covered and laid out on our bed, and what happened after that, Frederick, I couldn’t tell you if you held a blowtorch to my feet. He didn’t hurt long, though, which suggests a measure of divine justice because his disease had tormented him, mentally and physically, for twenty years or more, God rest his soul.