Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! (10 page)

“Good morning, Mr. Lugosi. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

Carl Laemmle, Jr.—the most powerful man in the room, for all his youth and tiny stature—cannot help but behave like a starstruck fan. The tall Continental in the beautiful black suit towers over him by a foot, and although he is almost invariably cordial, his manner seems aloof, as though he’s been a movie star for many years instead of just four months. Few who have met him suspect the truth, that his limited command of English is responsible for his distant manner. The man is shy and somewhat suspicious of being taken advantage of, with good reason:
Dracula
has saved the studio from bankruptcy, but Bela Lugosi was paid only five hundred dollars for playing the lead.

The young man turns away to welcome the two men who have entered the screening room behind the actor. Cameraman Paul Ivano, the only native-born American of the three, but who affects European ways, bows smartly; there is about the gesture a faint impression of heels clicking. Conversely, Robert Florey, a husky, six-foot-four Frenchman, stoops to pump Laemmle’s hand like a bluff Midwesterner. He is one of Hollywood’s legendary hosts, whose stock is high with every caterer, florist, and bootlegger in three counties. Both men address the twenty-three-year-old chief of production as Junior: His father, who founded the studio (and incidentally the West Coast motion picture industry), is “Uncle Carl” to everyone at Universal.

Last to arrive—with apologies—is Edward Van Sloan, minus the dignified hairpieces he usually wears on screen. In speech and carriage, the middle-aged actor is every bit the Broadway veteran, enunciating his consonants and accompanying them with broad but graceful gestures. He was in the first wave of talent imported from the eastern stage to lend voice to that frightening new innovation, the soundtrack. Many of the vamps, villains, and male and female leads who made the silent screen glitter cannot speak without demonstrating some accent or impediment inappropriate to their images; some cannot even act.

Junior pardons Van Sloan’s tardiness with a shrug. “I expect to enjoy the show. Any test the Catholics tried so hard to stop is bound to be a sensation.”

“Pious hypocrites, these special-interest thugs,” replies the actor. “When Bela and I did
Dracula
at the Fulton Theater, we went through a gallon of pig’s blood a week, and another pint when we added a second performance on Saturday. The Decency League said not a peep. We didn’t spill a single drop in the film, and they came swarming out of the woodwork like—like—”

“Rats!” Lugosi finishes, in a respectable imitation of Dwight Frye’s loony Renfield. Laughing, he seizes Van Sloan’s hand. They know each other well from months on the road.

Junior’s smile slips a notch. “Pious
and
powerful, don’t forget. The pressure’s even worse in England, where they have government censorship. Pop’s ready to pull the plug on
Frankenstein
if we lose that market.”

“Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley faced the same opposition when she published her book. That was one hundred years ago. Some things don’t change. But we have to.” Florey, who adapted the novel for his screenplay, taps a cigarette on the gold case it came from and fits it into a holder. “Tell Uncle Carl we can’t go on telling stories about sheiks and bullfighters. Pictures talk now; thanks to you.”

The round of laughter puzzles Lugosi. Ivano, the cameraman, fills him in, in his studied dialect.

“Junior would have made a splendid second-story man if he weren’t born in show business. He circumvented Warner’s Vitaphone patent by pilfering their sound equipment right off the lot.”

“Under cover of midnight.” Van Sloan’s intonation is sepulchral.

Junior’s grin returns. “Pop was proud as a peacock. He’s a bit of a buccaneer himself. He came out here one step ahead of Thomas Edison’s Pinkerton detectives. In those days, the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed sole ownership of the motion-picture-making process, and the courts backed him up.”

“They told me in Budapest you were all gangsters over here.” Lugosi draws thoughtfully on his cigar. “I can see now they were right.”

The Hungarian always sounds solemn, even when he’s joking. Junior, uncertain, changes the subject.

“How did you get along with the makeup?”

Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan stiffen, anticipating an explosion. But Lugosi is merely peevish. “That barbarian Jack Pierce wanted to give me a square head. I am an artist, not a scarecrow.” He leans heavily on the makeup expert’s name, ending it in a harsh sibilant:
Jock Peerrsss.
The Count would pronounce it just that way.

“Bela did his own,” Ivano put in. “It left his face free and took the lighting well.”

Junior is a diplomat. “Pierce is an artist too. We don’t want people confusing Frankenstein’s creation with the boss vampire just because the same actor played both roles.”

Florey gestures impatiently with his cigarette. “I’m still on record in opposition to Bela playing the brute. He’s much better suited to Frankenstein himself.”

“Fortunately, Robert has written me some lovely lines.” Bela blows a series of smoke rings.

“You should thank Mary. The creature in the novel is quite articulate, and inclined to go on; I could’ve written sides. I don’t suppose you could live with Percy without some of his epic poetry rubbing off on you.”

“He goes on a bit as it is. But we’ll discuss all that later.” Junior breezes through this dismissal. He’s consulted with his father on Florey’s script. Carl, Sr., doesn’t know Percy Shelley from an act in vaudeville, but he agrees with his son that no one with ears would accept a Hungarian Frankenstein’s Monster. They’ve decided the part will be mute. “Well, let’s see what you’ve all been up to this past week.”

They take their places in plush tan mohair seats trimmed with glistening mahogany, an Art Deco theme introduced by Junior’s interior designer, who redid the screening room immediately after Uncle Carl promoted his employer to his present position. The lights dim, the projectionist starts his machine whirring, and a beam of white shoots out and lands on the screen, with the smoke from Florey’s cigarette and Lugosi’s cigar curling in the shaft.

Director and studio chief watch the jumpy numerals counting down to the first frame with professional eyes, mentally adding editing and laboratory shellac to the rough-cut product to follow. Possibly a musical score; although that’s a subject of controversy in this brave new world of the sound feature. Will the audience be distracted, looking around and wondering where the music is coming from? Such a simple invention—a common phonograph record, synchronized to the action onscreen—and so profound in its effect. It has changed everything about the way the business is run, from casting through promotion to distribution. How will Garbo’s heavy Swedish accent and hoarse contralto play in Omaha? What will become of Fairbanks-style swashbucklers now that the camera is sealed in a soundproof cell and can no longer follow an actor swinging from a chandelier and bounding from the deck of one pirate ship to another? Can Ramon Novarro deliver a line without sounding like Blanche Sweet? Challenging times. It’s no wonder the torch has passed to the Jazz Age Generation.

The screen test begins, on the gloomy Carfax Abbey set lately inhabited by the company of
Dracula;
if Junior likes what he sees, it will be transformed with painted canvas flats, clever lighting, and young Ken Strickfadden’s whiz-bang electric pinball machines into Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The five men sit unspeaking throughout the moody creation scene building up to the entrance of the synthetic man: the money shot that will make or break the picture, for in the heart of everyone connected with it lurks the hope of duplicating the sensation of Lon Chaney’s unmasking in
The Phantom of the Opera.
That shot sent millions to bed with all the lights on, and kept Universal solvent throughout the horrendously expensive transition to sound.

It starts off well. Ivano is a journeyman cinematographer and the scene is a setpiece that adapts comfortably to the camera’s enforced incarceration in its bunkerlike enclosure, where the noise of its bearings and cooling fans cannot be recorded by the undiscriminating microphone. The lighting is basic, but serviceable, and the pace appropriate to suspense. Van Sloan is dependable as always. He reads his cynical lines in beautifully rounded tones to the contract player standing in for whoever will take his place in the lead. (Central Casting wants Leslie Howard, but Florey is holding out for someone equally British, but more dynamic. Is Ronald Colman available? Junior, who truly loves movies, wonders if he will ever again be able to watch one without being distracted by better alternatives.)

The tiny audience fidgets while the reels are being changed. Throats are cleared. Commentary of any kind is considered bad luck, in the grand tradition of the theater. Lugosi extinguishes the stub of his cigar with a contented sigh and applies himself to the art and science of igniting another so that it burns evenly. He seems sanguine; who knows what goes on inside the head of an Eastern European, and an actor at that? Dracula, for him, is a contemporary documentary. In the village where he grew up, people did not hang garlands of garlic on their front doors to welcome Father Christmas. Junior clears his throat. It’s an ominous sign for Florey and Ivano, fellow Hollywood insiders that they are. Young Laemmle doesn’t smoke and is not inclined toward excess phlegm.

The second reel commences to turn. All lean forward as Ivano’s camera tracks in tightly on Lugosi in full makeup, the round peasant face framed by a Buster Brown wig blown up to Brobdingnagian proportions filling the screen, waxen and still but for the eyes, shifting from side to side with pin-lights reflecting off them, as they had in his signature film; an actor never abandons a trick that worked once. The shot resembles nothing that has ever been seen on film before.

The tense silence is shattered by a strident sound: Junior Laemmle’s high-pitched laughter, innocent as a boy’s.

An excruciating few seconds ensue: To the end of their lives, Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan will swear that they seemed like five long minutes. Finally, the last foot of celluloid flutters through the gate like a fish frantically escaping an angler’s net.

The lights come up indecently fast. Everyone blinks.

Silence.

Junior springs to his feet, youthful energy incarnate in a five-foot, ninety-pound frame. “I’ll have my secretary arrange a conference. Thank you, gentlemen.”

In comparison to the awful stillness following the end of the test, the round of handshaking seems lightning fast. Junior’s size-six feet in hand-lasted leather actually pitter-patter toward the exit.

Florey, Ivano, and Van Sloan stand with hands in pockets, looking at one another and the blank screen, as if they hold it responsible for what has taken place on its surface.

“Ivano!”

Lugosi’s loud baritone makes everyone else jump. He is beaming; no one has seen his face split so wide since the first review broke for
Dracula
in
The Hollywood Reporter.
“My close-up was magnificent!”

He thrusts a fistful of cigars into the cameraman’s hand.

Van Sloan, at least, has the presence of mind to respond. “Bela, you were never better.”

Lugosi slaps his back—the pair were never that close, throughout their Broadway run and the long trek during the road production, but there is something about Hollywood, the scent of the strange flora on the dry desert air, the bankrolls that seem to grow like coconuts from the palms in an impoverished world—and strides out, trailing dollar clouds of smoke.

“I never got the habit.” Ivano offers the cigars to Florey.

The director keeps his hands in his pockets. “Keep the cigars. Burn the film.”

10

THE SINGLE METALLIC
beep fell so far outside the world of 1931 it snatched him from his dream, alert on the instant. He was sitting on the sofa, Bela Lugosi’s biography lying open on his lap to the paragraphs Craig had underlined. The Oracle was dark but for the pool of light belonging to the lamp in the projection booth.

Valentino fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket and read the text message Harriet had left:

2 LATE 2 TALK NITE LUV U

He smiled and began to text her back, but then he saw it was almost 5:00
A.M.
If that was late for her, not early, she must have been out all night. He harbored evil thoughts about antiques dealers and ex-FBI agents everywhere, and snapped shut the cell.

To stop thinking about Harriet, he thought about his dream. Harriet had told him he was the only person in the universe who didn’t star in his own fantasies; in this case he hadn’t even appeared, watching the action the way he watched movies. The lines Craig had marked in
The Man Behind the Cape
dealt with Lugosi’s disastrous screen test for
Frankenstein,
but had not included details, apart from Junior Laemmle’s laughter when the actor’s made-up face appeared and Lugosi’s gift of cigars to Paul Ivano over his delight regarding his close-up; the rest, including the conversation, had come from Valentino’s own imagination.

Still, the episode must have gone something like what he’d dreamt. Robert Florey had mentioned it a number of times before his death, and Boris Karloff, who had not been present, had provided his own version. Karloff may or may not have seen the test, but he’d described Lugosi’s makeup as “hairy, not at all like our dear Monster.” Florey had compared it to the claylike features and massive wig worn by Paul Wegener in the German silent feature
Der Golem
in 1920. Whether or not Jack Pierce, the genius who’d created Karloff’s iconic look as the Monster, had indeed tried to fit Lugosi with a similar “square head” was conjecture; James Whale, who replaced Florey as director, later insisted that the final product was the result of a collaboration between himself and Pierce. But it was true the star of
Dracula
had not gotten along with the makeup man and his arduous procedures, and that upon learning that he would have no lines to speak as the Monster, had left the production abruptly. He and Florey had then teamed on
The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
a box office bomb in which the star was upstaged by a gorilla. Universal dropped the men and kept the ape.