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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 44 |
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I've Known |
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In 42 years of interviews,
you meet a few monsters
of TheColumnists.com
A very sweet and gentle old fellow once told me--with the deepest sincerity--that he owed everything to a monster.
That isn’t so unusual, though, once you know the elderly gentleman I was talking with that day was the legendary Boris Karloff, who believed he owed his movie stardom to the role of the monster in the original 1932 "Frankenstein."
"He’s been very good to me," Karloff said. "I’ve never had to worry about finding work since I made that picture."
Up until then, though, Karloff had worried a lot between jobs. He’d been acting professionally for more than 20 years, playing supporting parts in theater productions all over the U.S. and in his native England, but rarely landing a movie role that really put the spotlight on him. He was 44 when he got the chance to play the monster in Universal’s follow-up to its 1931 hit "Dracula"--only because the star of that film, Bela Lugosi, refused to play a character who had no spoken dialogue.
Though another actor might have hated being typecast as a "horror man" for the rest of his career, Karloff believed being typecast was the making of him as a "bankable" actor in films. If he wanted to do something else, he explained, he could always do it on stage. where he could even play genial comic roles like the one he was playing when I interviewed him in 1962--the old man in "On Borrowed Time" in summer stock in Monterey, Calif.
As you must have heard countless times by now, the real Boris Karloff was the nicest, most refined and good-natured man you could imagine. He was white-haired and rather bowed over by arthritis, walking with the aid of a cane. He looked positively harmless for a career monster. When I asked some of the local actors what they thought of him, their universal comment was, "Dear old Boris. He’s a sweetheart!"
In my 42-year career as a newspaper reporter, news bureau chief and nationally syndicated television columnist, I often sought out Hollywood’s "horror men" for interviews. I grew up on all the wonderful old monster movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s--No, I’m not THAT old; I saw most of them first on "Creature Features" TV shows in the 1950s--and I developed a real affinity for them.
Most of them turned out to be "nice" men like Boris Karloff, despite their nasty images on the screen.
In 1958, Lon Chaney Jr. invited me into his home on a hill overlooking Universal City, which used to be just the old Universal lot, where his famous dad made "The Phantom of the Opera" in silent days and where Lon Jr. became a "horror man" on his own as the star of "The Wolf Man" in 1941.
The big, burly, craggy-faced Chaney was a fun-loving guy and a great storyteller, regaling me with loads of stories about his exploits in and around those creepy pictures he made at Universal. Just a year earlier, I’d seen "Man of A Thousand Faces," Universal’s movie biography of Lon’s father, and told him how moved I was by the scene where the dying Chaney, played by James Cagney, hands his son (played by Roger Smith) his makeup kit and urges him to carry on his legacy.
"Nothin’ like that ever happened," Chaney Jr. told me, a dark look coming over his face. "My dad didn’t want me going into pictures--and I never wanted to take his name either."
In fact, Creighton Chaney (Lon Jr.’s real name) ran his own plumbing business in the early 1930s and didn’t seriously pursue acting until his business failed in the early years of The Great Depression. Needing cash fast, he succumbed to the studio offers and took roles in pictures under his real name. Mainly stuck in small roles in minor films, he finally agreed to become Lon Chaney Jr.--and he moved up to starring roles almost immediately. His greatest role before he turned to monster parts was the moronic Lenny in the 1939 "Of Mice and Men," a role he had played in the West Coast stage version of John Steinbeck’s book and play.
It was true, though, that Chaney Jr. learned all the secrets of his dad’s makeup techniques by watching his father create his famous characters. So, when Universal first turned him into a horror movie star with "Man-Made Monster" in 1941, Chaney expected to do his own makeups--but was barred from doing so by union rules.
"Look at these and tell me what you think," Chaney Jr. said that afternoon, showing me photos of the makeups he did for himself for several roles, including The Mummy. They were fabulously good.
At the time of our interview, I was a student at UCLA and was writing Hollywood interviews for my hometown paper in Santa Cruz, Calif. Chaney was back to doing supporting parts in films like "High Noon," "Not As A Stranger," "The Defiant Ones" and leading roles in cheap horror pictures like "Indestructible Man." He certainly didn’t need small town publicity, so I assume he gave me an interview just because he was a nice guy and liked to talk about the old days.
It was dark when I finally left Chaney’s home. I didn’t own a car then and the taxi I’d come in was long gone, so Lon and his charming wife happily gave me a ride back to Westwood. Some monster, right?
Though both Karloff and Chaney were grateful for the typecasting as horror actors, John Carradine thought it cheapened his career. When I interviewed him, he was playing Shylock in a local repertory production of Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice" in Palo Alto, Calif. He was then 65 and insisted his first love was the theater.
"I did them (horror pictures) to finance my repertory company," he told me.
Carradine had a high respect for Karloff, but thought Boris seldom got the chance to show what a really good actor he was. They had worked together on the stage before the first "Frankenstein" film and, like Lugosi, Carradine also had rejected an offer to play the monster because the part had no lines.
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part in "The Invisible Man's Revenge." That's Jon Hall under the wraps. |
"About three months later, they got Boris," Carradine told me. "He accepted and, of course, it made him a star."
Ironically, Carradine ended up playing a minor role opposite Karloff in "The Bride of Frankenstein" in 1935. He’s one of the "woodsmen" who find The Monster living in the log cabin of a blind man and Carradine is the one who sounds the alarm that leads to the Monster’s capture.
Carradine finally became a "bankable" name when he played the nasty prison guard in John Ford’s "The Prisoner of Shark Island" in 1936. His reputation as a horror actor didn’t really get going until he played a mad scientist in "Captive Wild Woman" (1943), then Count Dracula in both "House of Frankenstein" (1944) and "House of Dracula" (1945). His first horror film as the leading star was the critically-acclaimed "Bluebeard" (1944), in which he seduced--and strangled several beautiful women.
"It was, I think, the biggest part I ever had in a picture," he said. "There was an implication that I was a successful lover. I very seldom have had that experience in pictures."
Another of my "horror" acquaintances was Vincent Price, who had the dubious pleasure of being drowned in a vat of wine in 1939 by Boris Karloff in Universal’s "Tower of London." Price was playing the unfortunate Duke of Clarence, who had the bad luck to get in the way of ambitious Richard III (Basil Rathbone).
Despite that featured appearance in a major horror film and his starring role in "The Invisible Man Returns" in 1940, Price really didn’t get typed as a horror actor until 1953 when he shocked filmgoers as the horribly-scarred operator of the "House of Wax," a 3-D box office bonanza for Warner Bros. From then on, he was America’s No. 1 horror star, gradually replacing Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney in the minds of younger horror fans of the 1950s and ‘60s after starring in a long series of films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, among them "House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Raven."
I became acquainted with Price when his horror career had begun to wane and his primary job was hosting TV’s "Mystery!" series on PBS. In person, he was a tall, somewhat effete, highly-cultured and absolutely charming man whose outlook on life was very upbeat. He could talk on virtually any topic, especially art and gourmet cooking. In fact, my friends at WGBH in Boston, where Price taped his introductions to each season’s "Mystery!" Programs, told me their only problem with Vincent was prying him away from visitors to the studio, who loved to sit and listen to his stories.
Price loved being the star of all those horror movies--and never felt it kept him from doing the other things he loved doing, like comedy. One of the last things he did on screen was his cameo as the "mad doctor" who created the odd title character played by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s wonderfully imaginative and humorous 1990 fantasy, "Edward Scissorhands."
The last time I saw Price, quite by accident, was not long before his death in 1993. I was having lunch with actor Sam Elliott at Le Dome, one of the trendiest restaurants on the Sunset Strip in L.A., and Price was dining with his wife, actress Coral Browne, at the next table. We both were amused to hear Price being scolded rather loudly by Mrs. Price, apparently for neglecting his diet and ordering the wrong thing for lunch. Poor Vincent looked so chastened that it was hard to remember this same fellow used to pour molten wax over such women in his days as a horror movie star.
Anthony Perkins, forever remembered by movie fans as the loony Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 "Psycho" and three non-Hitchcock sequels, was delighted he’d been chosen to play that immortal cross-dressing psychopath because it saved him from sliding into obscurity as a 1950s "star of tomorrow" who never made it to conventional leading man roles.
When I chatted with Perkins in 1986, he’d just directed himself in "Psycho III" and was having a grand time squeezing as much fun as he could out of reprising that wacky character, who always seemed to look a little better in a straitjacket. In sharp contrast, Perkins was a stylish dresser and, as far as I know, wouldn’t be caught dead wearing any of his mom’s fashions around the house.
Perkins’ Norman Bates inspired a great many young filmmakers of the late 1970s and early 1980s to invent their own "psycho slasher" villains, like Michael Myers of the "Halloween" films and Jason Voorhees of the "Friday the 13th" series. Both those characters wore masks, so the actors who played the parts really had no name recognition. But director Wes Craven picked Robert Englund to play the demonic Freddy Krueger in his 1984 "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and made a horror star out of the little known actor.
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Before that, Englund was best known for playing Willie, the "turncoat" extraterrestrial who helped the earthlings in "V," the TV miniseries about an alien invasion of Earth. Englund looked like a natural for comedy with his weak chin, receding hairline and a nose that looked as if someone had recently slammed a car door on it.
But his scar-faced Freddy,
whose gloved fingers all sprouted razor blades, was probably
the nastiest screen villain of the 1980s--and Englund was having
a grand time playing him when I talked with him in 1986 just
before shooting started on "A Nightmare on Elm Street III."
"Playing Freddy is a lark," he told me. "Way down
deep I’ve always wanted to play a monster. I guess you could
call it my operatic side."
In person, Englund is a fidgety, high energy guy who loves to laugh at just about anything, especially himself and his oddball exploits as an actor. Somehow that wild and crazy persona has inhabited his horror movie character, which may be why he still has such a cult following of fans who dote on Freddy Krueger’s often zany approach to mayhem.
What do all these horror movie icons have in person? Obviously, I’d say it’s the fact they didn’t take themselves seriously and NEVER took their screen images home with them.
However, we probably shouldn’t
take it for granted they’re all that way. I never met the
late Bela Lugosi, but it’s common knowledge he left instructions
that he be buried wearing his Count Dracula cape. Perhaps he
assumed, after all those sequels, that he’d be coming back
some day--and wanted to be dressed for it.
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
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