The Ghoul Goes West Read online

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  “But now, since I play Dracula, I am the bogeyman.”

  —Bela Lugosi, December 11, 1951

  My brother Denny died when I was twenty-six.

  I got the call at 1:13 in the afternoon—which made it 10:13 in Los Angeles. I know this so precisely because I’d been at my manuscript all morning, lost in a dream of old Hollywood, and when the phone startled me out of my reverie, I glanced at my watch, as you do when you have been surprised awake. I was in my apartment, at my desk, the merciless August sunlight of east Tennessee molten in my windows. Denny and I had both fled the grim wastes of western Pennsylvania, seeking warmer climes. As soon as he’d collected his high school diploma, Denny had gone west, to California. Two years later, when I collected my own, I’d headed south. I sometimes thought he’d made the better choice, but that morning, when I picked up the phone, I was reminded otherwise.

  The man on the other end asked if I was Benjamin Clarke.

  “Ben,” I said.

  The man paused as if the intimacy was unwelcome. When he spoke again—“Mr. Clarke,” he said—I recognized the flat, impersonal sympathy affected by all officialdom, from priests to principals, when bad news was to be delivered. I braced my hand against the desk, and when he started to introduce himself as Officer Something or Other I interrupted him.

  “It’s Dennis, isn’t it?” I said.

  It was, of course. I’d known it from the minute I’d heard that tone in the officer’s voice. He went on to describe the circumstances, but he needn’t have bothered. Heroin might have been the proximate cause. But it was Hollywood that killed him.

  * * *

  The way Hollywood has of grinding up its postulants was much on my mind at the time. For the better part of a year, I’d been working on my thesis, a study of Ed Wood and his bizarre entourage: Vampira and the Amazing Criswell, Tor Johnson and Bunny Breckinridge, the whole gang of oddballs and misfits, Bela Lugosi among them. In one way or another, Hollywood destroyed them all, but it was Lugosi’s doom that particularly interested me, then and now. It was Lugosi who had drawn me to study film in the first place. It was Lugosi who had drawn Denny to Hollywood.

  Sometimes I think Lugosi must have dreamed of such a place before he even knew it existed—just as it was itself a dream, roused out of the slumbering dust by men who dared to seize life and pin it still breathing to a screen. It ate its history, and it feasted on hope. In Hollywood, even then, you were only ever as good as your last picture.

  Lugosi came there in 1928. Already forty-six years old, he’d fled his father’s fists more than two decades before. Fled the cobbled streets of Lugos, where Hungary and Romania kissed. Fled most of all the profession that had been chosen for him. He did not want to be a banker, did not want even to be himself. He wanted to be no one at all. He wanted to be everyone. He wanted to be a star.

  He’d worked his way to New York in the bowels of a merchant steamer. Broadway brought him fame, but even that fell short of his ambitions. So he took flight yet again, lured on by the glittering promise of the west. He fled until there was nowhere left to flee. He fled to Hollywood, and the sea.

  Lugosi’s story is unique only in its particulars. In its broad strokes it’s the story of a legion of dreamers just like him: behind them some provincial misery, before them the promise of another self waiting to be born. It’s Denny’s story in a nutshell, and I guess it’s mine as well—but in the winter of 1969, when our version of the universal tragedy really began, Bela Lugosi served as midwife to our aspirations. Denny turned fourteen that year—I was two years behind him—and though Vietnam was in full swing, Nixon had just taken office, and the Steelers were still reeling from a 1-13 season, what mattered most to us that February was a TV personality named Gabriella Ghoul. Pittsburgh’s bodice-bursting answer to Vampira, Gabriella Ghoul had a starring role in both our onanistic fantasies and the local late-night creature-feature showcase.

  Our mother disapproved of Gabriella and the creature features both, but Denny and I watched them anyway, sitting mesmerized on the threadbare carpet before the old black-and-white Zenith that we’d inherited from my grandparents when they upgraded to color. The movies Gabriella Ghoul introduced varied wildly in quality. If you got The Bride of Frankenstein one Saturday, you would get She-Wolf of London the next. But Lugosi’s Dracula—the only Dracula that really matters—stood apart from both the gold and the dross, sui generis.

  It is in many ways not a great film. Dwight Frye’s effete, lisping turn as Renfield has not aged well and the visual language of the movie is static and stagy, with little in the way of camera movement. I can still remember our disappointment in the opening scenes that cold February night. We had been snowbound all day and had hoped for something really good—a rerun of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or The Creature from the Black Lagoon—to alleviate our boredom. Instead we got this flat, hammy antique.

  We were on the verge of turning the movie off and going up to bed when Lugosi made his first appearance, creeping down the vast, cobweb-shrouded steps of Castle Dracula, candle in hand. The powerful impression Lugosi made then renews itself every time I watch the film. I am twelve years old again, seeing for the first time his slow, deliberate gestures, listening anew to the broken cadence of his line readings, that inimitable accent, the timbre of his voice. Lugosi’s performance is broad—he never escaped his theatrical training; he was always playing to the back of the house—but his onscreen charisma is undeniable. His presence dominates every frame thereafter, and one leaves the movie thinking it is better than it actually is. Lugosi didn’t just play Dracula; Lugosi was Dracula.

  I remember tearing myself away from the TV to look over at Denny. He looked gaunt and gray in the flickering blue radiance of the screen, his eyes deeply shadowed. He looked like he was already dead. In some sense, I suppose, he was.

  * * *

  Such were my thoughts as I boarded the plane at McGhee Tyson the following morning. I was routed through Atlanta and I managed to hold thoughts of Denny at bay until the long haul from Hartsfield to LAX. As the plane shuddered and wrenched itself free of the planet, it broke upon me that I was now entirely alone in the world. Our father had died in a mining accident when I was five and our mother had succumbed to cancer almost six years ago, not long after Denny left to chase his screenwriting dreams. I’d been seeing a girl in Knoxville, but both of us were pretty half-hearted about it. I’d left a message on her machine saying that I’d be out of town for a while, I’d give her a call when I got back, though I didn’t expect I’d really do so, and in fact never did.

  I don’t mean by this to suggest that Denny and I were close. We weren’t. Even befo
re our mother’s death, our dispositions divided us. Denny was reckless and I was not. He had some minor trouble with drugs in high school, and a few brushes with the law, also minor. I was always cleaning up his messes: shoving his laundry into the hamper, dragging him out of parties when he’d had too much to drink, and once, memorably, helping him bundle a half-naked cheerleader out his bedroom window. By the time he graduated high school, movies were the only thing holding us together—and even there our impulses differed. Mine was academic, his creative. I liked to tease scenes apart; he liked to storyboard new ones. When he left for L.A., we were already drifting into separate orbits. Mom’s death finished the job.

  We talked two or three times a year after that, twenty minutes at most. Denny would share some hair-raising story or other, I would describe my latest academic enthusiasm, and then we’d sign off, fraternal duties fulfilled for another four or five months. We never talked about anything real. I had vague intimations that he’d hit some rough patches in Hollywood, but he never shared the details. He was more forthcoming about his fleeting moment of success, churning out scripts for a sitcom that never found its legs.

  “It’s not a bad show,” he told me a few days after he landed the job. “Have you seen it?”

  I had not.

  “You should,” he said. “See what your older brother’s up to out here in Tinsel Town.”

  So I watched a couple of episodes, more out of curiosity than any kind of sibling loyalty. The thing was called Girl’s Best Friend. It was about a twelve-year-old girl and a talking dachshund—really an alien in disguise, dispatched from his home planet to study earthlings. The dog was constantly getting into binds because it didn’t understand human customs. Or how to be a dog. People overheard it talking every other episode, initiating all kinds of frantic hugger mugger. The talking was accomplished by bad puppetry. You can imagine.

  It was beneath my brother’s talents.

  “It’s just a way to make ends meet until something better comes along,” he told me when I pointed this out. “The money’s great. I’m going to be making almost a thousand dollars a week.”

  In 1980 this was big money indeed. But a TV writer’s job is perilous. When Girl’s Best Friend got its cancellation notice—it would come two years later—Denny would be unemployed again.

  “I hope you’re planning to bank some of it,” I said.

  Denny just laughed and changed the subject. That was the way it went.

  The last time we talked, I told him my thesis was on Ed Wood. He was incredulous.

  “Ed Wood?” he said.

  My thesis director had asked the same question, in the same tone. At the time, Plan 9 from Outer Space was simply one of the worst films ever made. It had not yet begun to generate the cult of camp affection it enjoys today. My director felt that the project was a waste of my talents, and it was only with great reluctance that she’d signed off on the idea. But I was interested in the tragedy of Lugosi’s final years, and by then his fate had been inextricably bound up with Wood’s.

  “Poor Bela,” Denny said when I explained this. The phrase had been Boris Karloff’s, or so the story went, and over the years it had become a kind of countersign, code for all the things that lay unspoken between us. Poor, poor Bela. Thinking of it now, as I winged my way across the country to untangle the mystery of my brother’s death, I felt something catch in my chest, and for a moment it was hard to breathe.

  “Hey, you okay, buddy?” asked my seatmate, an older guy who’d been drinking gin and hogging the armrest for the last two hours.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I wasn’t, though, and the question didn’t help.

  It was the same question I’d asked Denny at the end of that final conversation. “Poor Bela,” he’d said, and there was something troubling in his voice. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Sadness maybe, or bitterness, or sorrow.

  “You okay, Denny?” I asked.

  “Fuck you, Ben,” he said. Six months later he was dead.

  * * *

  In his waning years, when he struggled to make ends meet in low-budget farces such as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, Lugosi often spoke of suicide. If this talk at first elicited sympathy and concern from Ed Wood and his band of happy misfits, they soon became tiresome exercises in self-pity. You can only cry wolf so many times.

  This tension came to a head one evening in 1956 when Lugosi found himself in San Francisco, beating the drum for The Black Sleep, his first role in a major studio film in eight years. Yet even this modest comeback was a humiliation: once famous for his voice, Lugosi had been reduced to playing the mute valet of Basil Rathbone’s mad scientist. It was this, more than anything else, that led to his suicidal rumblings that night in the fourth-floor hotel room he shared with Tor Johnson, the behemoth former wrestling star who’d once billed himself as the Super Swedish Angel.

  As the story goes, the Angel, tiring of Lugosi’s musings, knotted one meaty fist in the back of the old man’s Dracula cape. Gripping Lugosi’s belt with the other hand, Johnson thrust him out the open window. I sometimes imagined what the experience must have been like for Lugosi, looking down between his feet at the busy street below. The pedestrians on the sidewalk could not have suspected that only the Angel’s mighty hands, the strained seams of a cheap Dracula costume, and a stifled hiccup kept a drunken Hungarian from crashing down on them.

  Picture it, if you can: the Angel crying in vexation, “Is this what you want, you damn hunkie?” and Lugosi swallowing, sobered. Inside, he’d pined audibly for an end to his sorrows; his new post outside the window must have imparted an altogether different perspective. The neck of his cape would have felt like a noose; when the Angel gave him a shake, the sidewalk would have wheeled far beneath him.

  “Well?” the Angel is said to have bellowed.

  “I think I vould like to come back in,” Lugosi reportedly said, and so the Angel hauled him back inside to face, once again, his reduced circumstances.

  What a precipitous decline it had been. There had been a time when Lugosi’s name had been on every lip, when Universal had been inundated with fan mail for their new matinee idol. He’d had money, a sumptuous estate in the Hollywood Hills, a Buick Straight 8 Deluxe. In short, he had been a star. Biographers have sometimes wondered why a man of his stature ever took up with such crackpot scrabblers after Hollywood glory as Ed Wood and Tor Johnson. Most of them have concluded that he was driven by financial exigency. But I wonder if there wasn’t more to it, if Lugosi hadn’t been seduced by the myth of his own stardom, and if they hadn’t fed his need to fulfill that myth. Among Wood and his troupe of lunatic aspirants, Lugosi would have retained the sheen of Hollywood celebrity. If they represented the nadir of Lugosi’s career, he represented the zenith of theirs. The Super Swedish Angel must have admired him. Perhaps he regretted his fit of pique. Perhaps he told Lugosi that he stood at the threshold of a career renascence that would lift them all to the giddy heights of fame.

  This is all a reconstruction, of course, colored by my own affection for Lugosi. There are multiple versions of the story; only in a few of them does the Angel actually dangle Lugosi out the window. In some, there are others in the room, men who were trying (and no doubt failing) to keep Lugosi sober for his next PR appearance. In one version, Lugosi’s rant occasions a desperate call back to Los Angeles, to Hope Lininger, Lugosi’s fifth wife.

  “He’s threatening to jump,” the caller cried down the line.

  “Then for God’s sake, open the window,” Hope is said to have replied.

  * * *

  I rented a Chevy Cavalier from Avis, threw my bags in the trunk, and caught the 105 east out of LAX. By the time I’d found my way to the 101 and the iconic Hollywood sign hove into view, my muscles were tense from negotiating the heavy Los Angeles traffic. But I still felt a thrill at seeing those nine letters strung across the slope of Mount Lee. Hollywood had always been more idea to me than geographical reality: a liminal threshold between what was and
what could be willed into being, where Norma Jeane Mortenson could become Marilyn Monroe, Archibald Leach Cary Grant, and Marion Morrison John Wayne. Hollywood was a place where an impoverished Hungarian immigrant named Béla Blaskó could become Bela Lugosi.

  In the end, of course, Hollywood had destroyed Monroe and Lugosi both—but it had also granted them a golden moment of stardom. The vast multitude of dreamers who washed up there weren’t even that lucky. They came in search of the selves they might become; they died in obscurity—or worse. In 1932, an aspiring actress named Peg Entwistle hurled herself to her death from the top of the Hollywood sign, a metaphor too obvious even for the silver screen.

  Movies change lives.

  That’s the fundamental axiom of my faith.

  Unfortunately, they don’t always change them for the better.

  * * *

  I found Officer Something or Other—his name turned out to be Grant—at the Hollywood Station of the LAPD, a low brick building on Wilcox. He was gruff and gray, but not unkind. When I asked if I could see Denny’s case file, he sighed. “You don’t want to see that,” he said, and when I averred that I did, he shook his head and set me up in an empty interview room: one-way glass, green and white tile on the floor, an ammoniac smell of Pine-Sol. I sat at the battered table, and looked down at the file, a manila folder labeled with my brother’s name and a case number.

  “Let me fill you in, instead,” Grant said from the door. “Some photos in there, you see them you can’t unsee them, you know what I’m saying. Maybe you don’t want to remember your brother that way.”

  “I think I have to look,” I said.

  Grant nodded. “If you say so.” He closed the door, and I was alone with the file. I hesitated, tempted suddenly to push it aside, to stand up and let myself out of the room, to catch the next flight back to Knoxville. Denny was dead. What more was there to know or do? I’d spent the first decade and a half of my life cleaning up his messes. Why not let someone else take care of this one?