The Ghoul Goes West Read online

  Who knows why we do the things we do?

  That’s one thing the movies always get wrong: the complexity of human motivations.

  I opened the folder.

  The police report was straightforward. A woman had called it in. She refused to give her name, and by the time the police had arrived at Denny’s apartment, she was gone. Denny had been dead for a while. The cause seemed obvious enough. He was on the sofa. The needle was on the floor at his feet. Grant had already told me they were just waiting for the toxicology report to confirm it.

  I thumbed through the pictures. Maybe they wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have pretended that Denny was asleep. It wasn’t easy to do, though. There was something missing in the set of his face, some vital essence. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and I can’t now. He was dead, that’s all. You didn’t have to look twice to know it.

  I tapped the photos into alignment, slid them in behind the thin sheaf of papers and closed the folder. I found Grant in the squad room. He tucked the file away in a drawer. I took the seat beside his desk.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  That question again. I laughed without humor. “Sure. I guess so.”

  Grant studied me in silence. A buzz of activity filled the room, low and electric: men talking quietly into phones, the hum of a photocopier, laughter from a counter by the coffee urn.

  Grant had tracked my gaze. “Can I get you a cup?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Stuff tastes like battery acid,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Clarke?”

  “Did he suffer?”

  “Just went to sleep, that’s all.”

  I thought about that for a while. There was suffering and there was suffering. I figured you didn’t stick a needle in your arm unless things were pretty bad.

  “I’d like to see his apartment,” I said at last. “Am I allowed to do that?”

  “Have to ask the property manager. We’re done there. I can call ahead, if you want.”

  I said that I’d like that. Thanked him. Stood.

  “Mr. Clarke.”

  I turned to face him.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen your brother?”

  “Two years.”

  “You were close?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “No use chasing ghosts,” he said.

  But I didn’t have any other choice, did I? How else could I lay them down to rest?

  * * *

  By the time I wheeled the rental into the lot of Denny’s apartment complex, the buttery California light was melting into the arms of an enveloping blue dark. The shadows softened the utilitarian lines of the building, a repurposed motel, run-down and graffiti scrawled, the windows barred. An overflowing dumpster leavened the cool air with its reek. According to the sign out front, this was the Paradise Arms—the master stroke, perhaps, of an accomplished ironist.

  I caught the manager as she was closing up for the day. She was weary and heavy-set, sixtysomething, kind. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said as she led me to Denny’s apartment. “It’s an awful tragedy.”

  She unlocked the door and turned on the light.

  The place was a not unpleasant contrast to the squalor outside. The kitchenette, behind a waist-high dividing wall, was spotless, the living space clean and spare, without luxury aside from the TV—a 32-inch Panasonic with a matching VCR. The other furnishings had seen better days. A card table piled with books looked like it might collapse at any moment. The chairs were mismatched. The sofa sagged. A half-dozen video tapes in clear rental boxes stood atop a coffee table that could have been fished out of the dumpster outside. From the far wall, where Denny had taped up a poster of Dracula, Lugosi leveled his menacing gaze. Bela had brought Denny to Hollywood. It was fitting, I suppose, that when he died there, Denny had died under the failed Hungarian’s watchful eye.

  “You’ll want to go through his things,” the manager said. Then, apologetically: “Sooner is better, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could start in the morning—”

  “Why not tonight?”

  She glanced at her watch. “It’s nearly six. You’ll want to get to your hotel.”

  “Perhaps I could stay here.”

  I could see her thinking it through.

  “Is the rent paid?” I asked.

  The manager hesitated. “Through the end of the month,” she said. In divulging this, of course, she had already conceded. Five minutes later she pressed the key into my hand, and a moment after that I was alone in the apartment where my brother had died.

  * * *

  But it was Lugosi, as much as Denny, that I found myself thinking about that night as I sat sleepless in his living room, wired with jet lag. Denny had lost his battle with drugs; Lugosi had won his. In 1955, shortly before the debut of Bride of the Monster, his second feature with Ed Wood, Lugosi checked himself into Metropolitan State Hospital for morphine addiction. He was by then poverty stricken, emaciated by alcohol and drug abuse, despairing. Wood had pledged the premiere’s proceeds to defraying Lugosi’s medical expenses, but the opening-night profits, if any, must have been negligible—certainly inadequate to cover even a fraction of Lugosi’s costs. Despite Wood’s ambitions as an auteur, he had no talent or even competence as a filmmaker, and his posthumous fame as a camp icon was then inconceivable. It is one of the tragedies of Lugosi’s career that critics routinely rank his films with Wood among the worst movies ever made.

  Nevertheless, Wood was a good friend to the former star, paying him regular visits at the hospital long after Hollywood had written him off, and promising him the lead in his next opus when there were no other parts to be had. Perhaps the scripts Wood showered him with provided Lugosi some comfort during the harrowing three months that followed. He later described his withdrawal from morphine as a nightmare of painful extremes: scalding fever one moment, glacial cold the next. At times, he could not bring himself to move. At other times, his limbs spasmed violently. He gnawed his blankets to fight the pain. He shat himself, a hot, reeking gruel down the back of his thighs, and he wept in shame as the nurses cleaned him up. Afterward, he struggled to the chair, humiliated, and watched them change his sheets with businesslike efficiency. “I want to die,” he moaned, and it was true: in that moment, he longed for nothing more than annihilation.

  Yet he recovered, and when he left the hospital, he exited with one of Ed Wood’s screenplays in hand. “I’m looking forward to work again,” he told a reporter on the steps of the sanitarium. “I have an assignment playing the star part in Eddie Wood’s The Ghoul Goes West.”

  But Wood could not get the financing to shoot the picture. Lugosi had played his final starring role. A little more than a year later, he died of cardiac arrest while taking an afternoon nap. Hope Lininger found him clutching a copy of Ed Wood’s unproduced screenplay. Hollywood had killed him a decade before. The heart attack merely made it official.

  Poor Bela, Denny would have said. Poor, poor Bela.

  But Denny, too, had died in thrall to the bitch goddess of the screen. He’d sacrificed everything to her: his ambition, his family, and finally his life. When Mom fell ill, I took a sabbatical from school and returned to Pennsylvania to take care of her. I hadn’t been home a week before the doctor told us she had six months if she was lucky. I called Denny with the news. “Come home,” I said.

  “I will,” he promised, but the sitcom deal was just coming together, and he kept putting it off—one week and then two. The weeks piled up and turned into a month.

  “You need to come, Denny,” I said. “She’s dying.”

  “One more week,” he said, but there were no more weeks to be had. She died three days later.

  Denny didn’t come home for the funeral, either. He’d been in the writers’ room of Girl’s Best Friend for less than a week and didn’t want to risk making a bad impression. Mom would have understood, he told me, and maybe she wo
uld have. But I spent the rest of the fall at home alone, seeing the will through probate, getting the house ready to put on the market, attending to the life insurance and a thousand other details. When all was said and done, the estate came to just over $80,000. I mailed Denny a cashier’s check for his half, and included Mom’s engagement ring as a keepsake—something to remember her by, since he seemed to have forgotten.

  * * *

  I talked with Susan Mazur, Denny’s agent, the next afternoon. She had an immaculate second-floor office in an old building, two blocks off Wilshire. I’d expected something altogether different: a high-powered Hollywood super-lawyer in a glass box downtown. William Morris maybe, or CAA. But of course Denny didn’t move in those circles. It had been three years since Girl’s Best Friend, and as I’ve said, that had been a middling success at best, commensurate neither with his ambitions nor his ability, which had apparently been considerable. He was good—“really good,” according to Mazur. “Hell, that was part of his problem,” she told me. “He thought he was too good for this town.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that show, the dog from space thing. I worked hard to get him in that room, and he blew it.”

  “How?”

  “The kid was a wreck. All he could talk about was you and your mother. It was a tough thing for him, losing your mom. After he quit—”

  I sat back. “I thought the show was cancelled.”

  “That was later. He lasted a couple months at most.” She gave me an appraising look. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “No, I—He never mentioned it.” I’d always assumed that he’d lasted for the entire run. “What happened?”

  “He decided talking dogs were beneath him. He should have stuck it out, saved the money against a dry spell, but—” She shrugged, sighed. “It’s hard to take in, isn’t it? What a terrible goddamn waste.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “A month ago, maybe? Not long. He had this script he wanted me to look at,” she said. “Some kind of crazy biopic about Bela Lugosi. Not a commercial project. I have it around here somewhere.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Why not,” she said. “Let me see if I can dig it up.”

  She showed me to the door ten minutes later, still shaking her head in disbelief. And then I was outside, Denny’s screenplay in hand. I tossed it on the passenger seat of the Cavalier. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. What kept coming back to me was how furious I had been when Mom had died and he’d decided to stay in California. What kept coming back to me was the conversation where I’d told him that talking dogs were beneath him. Now, I wondered why I’d found it necessary to share that insight. He surely didn’t need me to point out that he’d fallen short of everything he’d hoped to be.

  * * *

  In the months after my mother died, when the house seemed to echo around me, I probably saw two or three movies a week—virtually every film that showed up in the small town where Denny and I grew up. I felt something unclench inside me the minute I walked into the theater lobby. The ushers and projectionists soon knew me by name; the staff at the concession stand had my order waiting by the time I stepped up to the counter. But the really comforting moment came when the lights went down and I fell away from myself, lost in whatever dream flickered to life on screen. I watched without discrimination. I might see Piranha one night and The Deer Hunter the next, and both were fine by me. It didn’t matter what world the movie carried me off to, as long as it carried me away from that pinched and narrow Pennsylvania town—from the stark fact of my mother’s death, and my resentment of Denny for leaving me to tie off the loose ends of her life alone.

  And even when I wasn’t at the movies, I was tuning in to them at home. There were still lots of films on network TV in those days: Johnny Weissmuller on Saturday afternoons and Shirley Temple on Sundays, and all sorts of made-for-TV movies, from The President’s Mistress to The Time Machine. And though Gabriella Ghoul was long gone, you could always count on catching a Hammer horror film after the late local news on Saturday night.

  Movies, then. Movies to the last.

  And it was a movie I needed when I returned to Denny’s apartment that night. I sat at the card table, eating takeout Thai and studying the books piled up around me. Most of them looked like research for the Lugosi screenplay: the standard biographies (Lennig, Bojarski, Cremer), plus a study of the classic Universal monster movies, two or three histories of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and a coffee table book featuring photos of Los Angeles in the thirties. But just then I didn’t want to read about movies. I wanted to lose myself in one. So after I put my leftovers in the fridge, I sat down to look at the videos on the coffee table.

  I was halfway through the stack when I realized that the movie I was holding didn’t exist.

  None of them did.

  * * *

  As far as I’ve been able to determine, Lugosi never met Gene Autry, the famed Singing Cowboy of the ’30s and ’40s. But during the last year of his life he was scheduled to star opposite Autry in The Ghoul Goes West, the Ed Wood film he’d mentioned on the steps of the sanitarium. This is not as implausible as it seems. Wood’s former roommate, Alex Gordon, who’d grown close to Autry, could well have brokered an introduction. And Autry might have welcomed the opportunity to work again. By 1956, his career was on a downward trajectory. He hadn’t appeared on screen in three years. He’d gained weight. He was drinking heavily. Hollywood had been extraordinarily good to him—he’d made ninety-three films between 1934 and 1953—but in the end she withdrew her favors. The proposed film never came about. Wood couldn’t get the financing. Autry backed out. Lugosi died, leaving Wood with a handful of test footage he recycled into Plan 9 from Outer Space, the camp classic that would cement his reputation as the worst filmmaker ever to square up a shot.

  The entire episode earns only a single dismissive sentence in Lennig’s otherwise comprehensive Lugosi biography. It doesn’t even merit that in Autry’s 1978 memoir.

  Yet the film I was holding—a commercially produced VHS tape—was clearly labeled The Ghoul Goes West. And it was not alone. A second glance through the stack confirmed that the other films were similarly impossible. They shouldn’t exist. They didn’t exist. They had never been shot. They’d been abandoned. But here they were. Here was the Orson Welles adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Here was Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe’s final film, left unfinished at her death. Here were Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope, Clouzot’s Inferno, von Sternberg’s I, Claudius. A prank, surely. Someone had pasted fake labels onto the tapes—but why? To what purpose?

  Retrieving The Ghoul Goes West, I glanced at the sticker on the case: Dimension Video. Then I turned on the television and slotted the tape into the VCR. The film opened with a black-and-white shot of the Amazing Criswell seated behind a desk, delivering a bizarre monologue about “the mysteries of the past which even today grip the throat of the present to throttle it.” The speech was portentous and theatrical, overcooked, the framing static. Then the image faded, to be replaced by a flat desert landscape with a saguaro cactus, obviously fake, on the right side of the frame. The credits came up on the left, each new name preceded by the sound of a pistol shot. Autry had first billing, Lugosi second, both of them above the title. The rest of the cast followed, among them Vampira and Paul Marco and Tor Johnson, Wood’s usual suspects. My only thought as the attribution credit came up—

  Written • Directed • Produced

  by

  Edward D. Wood, Jr.

  —was that I was looking at some kind of bizarre forgery. Then Lugosi, in full Dracula garb, appeared on screen, rising from a casket in a dim crypt that looked like a suburban garage. It was unmistakably him. By that point in my thesis research, I’d seen virtually every movie Lugosi had made three or four times. I knew the shape of his face almost as well as I knew my own. I recognized the trademark gesture as he turned to face the camera and swept his cape aroun
d to cover his mouth. A stroke of lightning split the screen. It illuminated a gothic castle set implausibly atop a desert butte—clearly a painted flat, executed with about as much expertise as you’d expect in a third grader’s school play. Another cut, and here was a posse of cowboys gathered around a campfire. In the shot that followed, Gene Autry showed up, stout and out of shape, possibly drunk. He was strumming a guitar and belting out “Back in the Saddle Again”—or trying to belt it out; his once-pleasant tenor was shot, and he was slurring his words.

  I won’t try to describe the film that followed. It involved Lugosi, his vampire wife (Vampira, of course), and his mutant servant (Tor Johnson) menacing some rancher’s daughter, whom they wanted to impregnate (!) with their atomic ray (!). Autry and company rode to the rescue. It didn’t make much sense. But it wasn’t a forgery. Lugosi was undeniably Lugosi, Autry was unquestionably Autry. And the production was signature Ed Wood. The writing was incoherent, possibly the product of insanity. The production values were appalling.

  Mesmerized, I watched the film straight through to the end, rewound it, and watched it again. The whole enterprise saddened me. This was Hollywood. Its most fervent acolytes were mired in delusion. Its fading stars clung to their former celebrity. If passion alone had been enough, Ed Wood would have been an auteur on the order of Orson Welles (though Hollywood destroyed Welles, too); if hunger were sufficient, Lugosi and Autry would have held the spotlight until they died.

  After that I watched the other films. By the time I finished the last one, Inferno, it was nearly four. I rewound the tape, ejected it, and put it away, examining the plastic box for the second or third time. It was identical to the rental cases you saw everywhere in those days. Beyond the name of the store, there was no information to be had—no address, no phone number, nothing. The videos might have come from anywhere. They might have come from nowhere at all.

  * * *

  Denny’s alarm roused me, grainy eyed and exhausted, just past nine. I had one of those moments of psychic dislocation that you sometimes experience when you wake up unrested in a strange bed. For a breath, I wasn’t sure where I was or how I’d ended up there or why, and when it all came flooding back—Denny’s death and the long cross-country trek and the stack of movies that did not, that could not, exist—the whole series of events felt like some unfathomable dream. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. When I finally pulled things together enough to stand, I had to nerve myself up to face the movies in the next room. I was afraid they’d be there. I was afraid they’d be gone.