Bela Lugosi in Person

Introduction

Crowds sporting scary T-shirts and even scarier monster makeup gather at convention centers, cash in hand, waiting impatiently until the minute hand strikes the hour and guards open the doors. Once inside, the mob forms into lines, one after another. Some lead to actors with magic markers in hand, ready to inscribe 8x10 glossies to blushing admirers. Others lead to a photographer’s camera and lights, with fans quickly replacing one another at an actor’s side, each getting a quick hello or even a lucky handshake when they have their picture taken.

These paths cost money, but they lead directly to horror film stars. The two-dimensional figure once threateningly colossal on a theatre screen — or made miniature on a tablet or smart phone — now stands there in person, usually smiling, though not always, so that the movie fan can see him or her live and in the flesh.

The scene is not uncommon in the 21st century. Horror film conventions and autograph shows allow fans to meet and even mingle with Those Who Were There, with Those Who Were in the Film. Of course many of these persons are stars only in the sense that their onscreen characters have become popular. The hockey mask is famous; those who wore it are not, outside of a small coterie of devoted followers.

The notion of the film star making a personal appearance has existed for over a century. In St. Louis in 1910, during a period in which the slang term movie was just coming into common usage, moviegoers flocked to see The Girl of a Thousand Faces in person. She was Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl who was finally billed with her real name after being hired by Carl Laemmle, Sr., the mogul who started Universal Pictures.

In a cunning publicity stunt, Laemmle had anonymously announced that Lawrence had died, and then — to generate even more publicity — declared the first report was false. Lawrence’s health was never better; in fact, her new Laemmle-produced films were coming soon to a theatre near you.

When the assemblage in St. Louis laid eyes on Lawrence, they could hardly contain themselves. There she stood, both alive and live: overexcited fans allegedly rushed the stage and tore at her clothes. A trade publication reported that she had been met with the kind of enthusiasm hitherto reserved only for presidential candidates and prizefighters. [1]

The everyday person’s longing to see and even possibly meet the famous has deep historical roots, ranging from those who wanted to glimpse royalty in past centuries to those who gawked at Jesse James’ corpse in 1882. And collecting autographs was common during the nineteenth century, even before the advent of the cinema. [2]

But movie stars have exuded a unique allure, in part because they are so regularly present through their own absence. Unlike other kinds of celebrities during the classical Hollywood era, the film star — thanks to his or her illuminated reproduction at movie theatres — appeared in large cities and small towns on a regular basis. Fans came to know stars that they had never seen in person, let alone met.

The rise of the feature film resulted in more and more stars making personal appearances, whether acting in stage plays or promoting their films. During the twenties and thirties, an increasing number of stars also created vaudeville acts. As Variety reported in 1930: The theory appears to be that the stars will do for a one-time appearance anyway, [even if they are] unable to do more than look pleasant on the stage. [3] Sinews in venues, ready to smile and perhaps even shake one’s hand after the big show was over.

In some cases, personal appearances meant stars not only excited their fans, but also gained what Billboard called a stronger foothold in their respective studios, their employers learning just how popular they were. [4] And for those stars whose bright lights were dimming, working in vaudeville or summer stock provided much-needed income.

All that said, the personal appearance could cause stars a degree of stress, whether having their clothes pawed in public or having to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to cities and towns that did not stand in the shadow of a sign regally announcing Hollywoodland. At least some movie fans sympathized with the rigors that stars experienced when pressing the flesh. The topic surfaced in interviews published in movie magazines and even on the screen thanks to In Person (1935) with Ginger Rogers. In it, she plays a movie star who wears almost a femme Frankenstein getup in public so as to avoid all the many fans who want to meet her. [5]

The much-storied career of Bela Lugosi represents a tale that is both unique and common: sui generis and yet also generic. Like most movie stars dating back to Florence Lawrence (who committed suicide in 1938), his Hollywood career followed a typical trajectory: he climbed to film fame, and then — punctuated by one major comeback — he fell into increasing obscurity. Such is the gravity of being famous in Hollywood.

Other aspects of Lugosi’s career are distinctive, particularly in that, thanks to the 1931 film version of Dracula, he became the very first horror film star. Such a claim is certain to raise a few eyebrows, and yet it is very definitely the case, so much so that it is surprising that it hasn’t been more widely discussed in the myriad books and articles written about both him and the horror film.

To be sure, actors dating all the way back to Georges Méliès (the famous producer-director who appeared in the majority of his own films at the turn of the twentieth century) have portrayed horrific characters onscreen. During the silent film era, various persons did so on a repeated basis, including Paul Wegener, Conrad Veidt, and Lon Chaney. They were film stars, to be sure, but their stardom was founded on far more than bizarre characters and fantastical storylines. In a trio of books, for example, Michael F. Blake has expertly dissected Chaney’s filmography, illustrating that he was much more than a star in a small number of what we might now call horror films. [6]

The term horror film (or, by extension, horror movie) did not even concretize as a name for a distinct genre of cinema until the spring and summer of 1931. While that adjective was occasionally used in earlier periods to describe certain films or scenes within them, it was not until 1931 that horror film became used and understood in the film industry and American popular culture in the same way that one might say western or musical.

Here again we can invoke Bela Lugosi, as it was the release of Dracula, his most famous film, which propelled the term horror film into popular culture. In a fascinating disavowal of Universal Pictures’ publicity materials, critics and audiences across the United States eschewed romance and mystery taglines prepared for them and instead adopted the term horror, which would be repeatedly applied to similar films during the rest of 1931, throughout 1932, and in every single year since.

Lugosi was thus the first horror film star, his name and face and persona reaching stardom as a direct result of the newly termed cycle of films that Dracula initiated. He became famous for horror, rather than being a famous actor who played a few horrific roles. And the orbit he occupied was far higher than an unknown actor in a Michael Myers mask could ever hope to reach.

During his heyday, Lugosi’s fans not only wanted to see his films, but also to see him, up close and in person: to meet him, to get an autograph, to converse with him, or — hope of hopes — to befriend him, or even marry him (as Lugosi fan Hope Lininger did in 1955). While he had acted onstage at least as early as 1902, Lugosi’s live appearances after the release of the film Dracula were different. He was no longer a theatre actor, or even a notable Broadway actor, or — for that matter — a featured film player, as he had been in Hungary, Germany, and America.

After February 1931, he was a movie star, and so when he made public appearances in theatre, vaudeville, or otherwise, he not only had to modulate his performance in the manner all actors must when they go back and forth between stage and screen, but he also had to maintain a certain kind of presence. A star is more than an actor. A star brings with him or her certain expectations as well as histories, meaning their famous films and roles. For better or worse, he was Bela Dracula Lugosi.

That was the case from February 1931 onward. And Lugosi’s personal appearances were many in number and varied in type. In 1932, he was back on the legitimate stage in Murdered Alive, and was as a result the first horror film star to headline a three-act play. Later that same year, he revived Dracula — The Vampire Play, making him the first horror film star to appear onstage in a role that he had already played onscreen. In 1933, thanks to Earl Carroll’s Murder at the Vanities, Lugosi became the first horror film star to play Broadway. Only months later, he became the first horror film star to appear in vaudeville. [7]

And Lugosi in the flesh was something to behold. Consider what his fourth wife Lillian Arch said in an interview: I never got tired of watching him, because even without the makeup and all that he could be so charming. He’d charm anybody off their feet. And then when the beast [Dracula] came out of him, he looked so vicious. [8]

Many persons who saw Lugosi onstage remarked upon the power and intensity of his portrayals, which were informed by his screen persona and underpinned by his decades of experience in the theatre. Likewise, those who met him offstage regularly expressed surprise at how different he was in real life, even if real life in most of these cases meant public encounters that lasted for mere minutes or seconds.

And yet meeting Lugosi, even just shaking his hand, often left an indelible impression, becoming an important and unforgettable event. That was true not only of his legion of fans, but also of some of his fellow performers.

Even Elaine Stritch, Broadway’s grand dame, seemed to glow when speaking of Lugosi. As if to position herself closer to him, she shared an improbable anecdote, claiming he downed seventeen Scotch whiskeys when the two were together at a bar, and then — after the bartender refused to sell him more alcohol — successfully pulled a tablecloth out from under all the dishes and glasses resting atop it. From there, he sought more whisky elsewhere. [9] Lugosi live could be larger than life, larger even than his own real life.

It is true that the caliber of Lugosi’s personal appearances devolved during his 25 years as a horror film star in America. His very first after the release of Dracula seems to have been an advertised appearance at a Los Angeles film premiere in April 1931; his last was apparently a short publicity tour for The Black Sleep (1956), a horror movie in which he played a minor role. In prior literature, Lugosi’s films have usually commanded the most attention, and with good reason, given that he was first and foremost a movie star, certainly in America. But many of his live appearances from 1931 to 1945 ran parallel to when his Hollywood career was (in varying measures) at its peak.

Aside from scant paragraphs here and there, these live appearances have merited relatively little attention. Indeed, some of the dozen we cover at length in this study are unknown outside of his most dedicated fans.

The impetus of this book is thus two-fold. For one, we see intrinsic value in surveying these personal appearances, bringing to them a level of depth that has been absent in prior texts. The details of these performances, their critical reception, and their position in Lugosi’s life and career are important. Lost and forgotten histories deserve to be reclaimed. Secondly, we believe the era under review does indeed constitute the most important in Lugosi’s Hollywood film career. Production histories of those movies have been described on many occasions, whether in books specifically about him, as in Richard Bojarski’s The Films of Bela Lugosi (Citadel, 1980), or in the context of the horror genre, such as Tom Weaver’s Poverty Row Horrors! (McFarland, 1993). An increasing number of theoretical perspectives are being brought to bear on Lugosi films as well, as evidenced by texts like Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2015), edited by Mario Degiglio-Bellemare, Charlie Ellbé, and Kristopher Woofter.

For decades, the films of Hollywood stars have regularly been analyzed using these kinds of approaches, and rightly so. Investigating films using production information, censorship data, critical reviews, and even surviving fan letters can reveal important insights into a star’s career. By contrast, the personal appearance has seldom been used as a lens through which historians have examined an actor’s film career. Indeed, at first such a notion might well seem contradictory, as examining stage roles or vaudeville acts is arguably a matter apart from scrutinizing a film career.

However, that is in fact the second key purpose of this book: to present new perspectives on Lugosi’s film career by examining his work in the flesh. In many respects, these personal appearances speak directly to his film career, both its periods of success (as in his attendance at a film premiere) or its periods of decline (as in appearing at a reissue screening of Dracula when no new film roles were on offer).

The varied content of these in person events was also directly involved in a dialogue with Lugosi’s screen persona. For example, their content sometimes reflected roles he had portrayed onscreen, like Dracula of course, as well as roles that stage producers hoped he would eventually portray onscreen, if their plays became successful enough to be purchased by Hollywood studios. Such interactions between the two media can be distilled with one example: Lugosi would get laughs in live performances of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1943 and 1944 by revealing that he killed a victim because he said he looked like Bela Lugosi. The joke only worked because it drew upon Lugosi’s screen persona.

Put another way, Bela Lugosi’s film career was refracted through these live shows. Bela Lugosi in Person can teach us much new about Bela Lugosi on the screen, as well as the fans who enjoyed his movies. It is here that we hope to augment not only our understanding of Bela Lugosi, but also to propose a fresh approach to star studies, one that can be used to examine a Hollywood actor’s film career anew. Much can be learned about the cinema and its stars by an examination of these kinds of live appearances.

As in our prior book, No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi (BearManor Media, 2012), as well as in Rhodes’ earlier books on Lugosi and his films, we rely herein on a New Film History methodology that attempts to engage as rigorously as possible with primary sources. [10] While digitized archival materials have been extremely helpful, so too have the yellowing, one-of-a-kind pages that are buried at given libraries, historical societies, and museums. For the first time anywhere, for example, we present hitherto unknown information from declassified OSS files, as well as previously undocumented information about the long-forgotten television program Murder and Bela Lugosi (1950). As an addendum, we also provide a timeline of Lugosi’s personal appearances from the release of Dracula in 1931 until his death in 1956.

As part of this process, we have likewise attempted to recover and present relevant and in some cases previously unpublished illustrations. Some are stunning images, such as the one that adorns our book cover. Others survive only in crumbling newspaper pages or damaged microfilm. However, despite their poor quality, we believe it worthwhile from a historical perspective to include them, as they otherwise would languish unseen, lost to time.

Both of us believe our work represents an important intervention into an ongoing conversation about one of the most fascinating and important Hollywood film stars of the 20th century. As much as we have uncovered, more work remains. Definitive books on subjects do not exist, as the research continues.

As a result, we do not profess that the present volume records every single personal appearance Lugosi made, any more than we claim to have unlocked all of the mysteries of Lugosi’s Hollywood career.

However, we do hope this book represents an important exploration of Bela Lugosi in Person, ranging from his initial fame in the months following the release of Dracula in 1931 to the end of World War II in 1945. Here is an overlooked facet of Lugosi’s famous career, one that we are very pleased to share.

Gary D. Rhodes

Belfast, Northern

Bill Kaffenberger

Hanover, Virginia

1. Ovation for Film Star in St. Louis. Billboard 9 Apr. 1910.

2. See, for example: Autograph Collecting. Christian Advocate 26 Apr. 1883.

3. More Circuits Using Film Stars in Person for Theatre Stages. Variety 2 July 1930.

4. Schultz, John A. "The Value of Personal Appearances to Film Player [sic]." Billboard 29 Aug. 1936.

5. In Person. Variety 18 Dec. 1935.

6. Blake, Michael F. Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (New York: Vestal Press, 1990); Blake, Michael F. A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures (New York: Vestal Press, 1995); Blake, Michael. The Films of Lon Chaney (New York: Vestal, 1998).

7. Here we would underscore that we are speaking of Lugosi the horror film star. Certainly Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and others had been onstage prior to becoming horror film stars.

8. D’Arc, James V. Oral History Interview Donlevy, Lillian Lugosi. 20 May 1976. Available at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

9. Stritch, Elaine. Dracula Meets Elaine Stritch. Filmed interview excerpt from Theater Talk’s Elaine Stritch Birthday Bash. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqN-vao_de0. Posted 13 Feb. 2013. Accessed 25 Jan. 2015.

10. Rhodes’ other books on the subject include Lugosi (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), Bela Lugosi, Dreams and Nightmares (Narberth, PA: Collectables, 2007), and Tod Browning’s Dracula (Sheffield, England: Tomahawk, 2014).

Publicity still of Bela Lugosi for Dracula (1931), autographed to a fan. Courtesy of David Wentink

Lugosi signs an autograph for a fan in England in August 1935 while his wife stands beside him. Courtesy of D’Arcy More

Lugosi’s first known advertised personal appearance after the release of Dracula in February 1931. Published in the Los Angeles Times of April 17, 1931.

Fan letter from Lugosi’s future wife, published in Modern Screen in December 1935. Courtesy of Kristin Dewey

Portrait of Lugosi autographed for his friend, Alex Gordon.

Chapter 1

The Wine of Anubis

During his sideshow lecture, Dr. Mirakle unveils a caged ape and informs the frightened crowd: Here is the story of man. In the slime of chaos, there was the seed, which rose and grew into the tree of life. Life was motion. Evolution permitted a four-legged thing to stand upright and walk, and for an ape to become human. Mirakle’s arresting doctrine was little more than a recapitulation of Charles Darwin’s.

The famous carnival scene in Robert Florey’s film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) remains one of Bela Lugosi’s most memorable. With curly hair and nineteenth-century dress, Dr. Mirakle looks none-too-different than surviving photographs of Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1841 published the short story on which the film was based.

But the film’s script was quite different than Poe’s story. After all, Darwin did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859, and the character Dr. Mirakle does not even appear in Poe. Murders in the Rue Morgue had changed, in part from screenwriters reworking the Poe story and integrating elements of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Two stories grew and merged, thus creating a third. The result was Murders in the Rue Morgue, but a different Rue Morgue, a new Rue Morgue.

Here was evolution, even if not quite of a Darwinian type. Perhaps it was closer to what philosopher and politician Edmund Burke expressed in the eighteenth century: We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature. Or perhaps other terms are better suited to describe a phenomenon of change that involves literary and artistic homage, appropriation, growth, and metamorphosis.

At any rate, Murders in the Rue Morgue was hardly the first time that Lugosi interacted with such change. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula transformed considerably to become the 1927 Hamilton Deane-John L. Balderston Broadway play. Abbreviating the novel for the stage resulted in the elimination of all scenes set in Transylvania, as well as numerous important characters. The novel and the play were both Dracula, but they were not the same Dracula. The limitations of the stage — and the artistic input from writers other than Stoker — necessitated variations.

The same was true when Universal Pictures transformed Dracula into the 1931 film. It reinstated some aspects of the novel, drew upon certain elements of the stage play, and — thanks to the involvement of a number of screenwriters — introduced several new ideas. Once again, Dracula changed. So did Lugosi’s performance, as he himself realized. Playing Dracula onscreen was different than playing Dracula on the stage.

In a way, Dracula evolved even prior to Stoker’s novel, not merely in the shifting historical depictions of Vlad the Impaler, but also in vampire folklore. The same was true of vampire literature, from Polidori’s The Vampyre, A Tale (1819) to Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), as well as to the vampire onstage, from Planché’s The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820) to Boucicault’s The Vampire (1852, aka The Phantom).

Much like Deane-Balderston’s Count Dracula, for example, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven appears in England without initially arousing the suspicions of those who fall prey to his bloodlust. Likewise, Boucicault’s Rees is a wise elder not unlike Stoker’s Van Helsing, or — for that matter — the Van Helsing of Broadway in 1927 and of Hollywood in 1931. Put another way, the origins of Stoker’s Dracula predate his authorship of the novel.

Change also abounded in the nascent horror film of the early 1930s. After Dracula’s success, Universal initially considered a trio of possible sequels to it, but then quickly shifted its attentions from the supernatural to the natural. In the spring and summer of 1931, the studio debated over which story should be next on its agenda: Shelley’s Frankenstein or Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. In the end, Frankenstein came first, hitting theatres in November 1931, followed by Rue Morgue, released in February 1932.

But discussing the order of their release distracts from the larger point: both films featured mad scientist storylines, a major change from the supernatural vampires of Dracula. And while Lugosi famously did not appear in Frankenstein, he did portray Dr. Mirakle, a mad scientist who attempts to fuse the blood of a woman with that of an ape.

Lugosi’s evolution from Dracula to Mirakle was important, given the large number of times he would subsequently play mad scientists onscreen. It is also significant biographically, given that he was hoping to escape the horror genre: Rue Morgue transformed him from one kind of horror character into another.

That transition would also impact upon Lugosi’s return to the stage in 1932, his first major live appearance after becoming a Hollywood star in 1931. By the time that Rue Morgue was released in February 1932, a stage play called The Black Tower was surviving, even if not flourishing, on Broadway. When its New York run ended in March of that year, its reincarnation under the new title Murdered Alive was slowly coming to life on the West Coast. And that version would star Lugosi as yet another mad scientist.

The Los Angeles Herald and Express remarked that Murdered Alive was "the first stage appearance of Bela Lugosi since his footlight creation of the male vampire in Dracula. " [1] For the San Francisco Examiner, Murdered Alive meant, importantly, Lugosi in Person. [2] He was onstage, and ticket-buyers could sit nearby and watch him, just as Mirakle’s audience does in Murders in the Rue Morgue.

As for Lugosi, Murdered Alive proved to be a fascinating albeit minor component in his ongoing transition into horror movie stardom. And for Hollywood, the play became another brick in the foundation of the mad scientist genre, its influence extending beyond the sphere of any single actor or even the confines of the stage.

The Wine of Anubis (1913)

 ‘Tut! Tut!’ The old man smiled in good humor. ‘Drink the wine. It will heal all your pain. You’ve got to drink it, you know. You can’t help yourself. It will be much pleasanter not to be forced. Don’t you see how stiff you are? You can hardly raise your hand. Drink it!’ 

So wrote Crittenden Marriott in his short story The Wine of Anubis, published in America in The Blue Book Magazine in January 1913.

Born in Baltimore in 1867, Marriott was an author of some repute in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his work encompassing newspaper journalism, magazine articles, short stories, and novels. Best known among them was likely The Isle of the Dead Ships, a 1909 novel that merited a reprint in 1925. [3] By the time Marriott died in 1932, it had twice been adapted for the silver screen: Maurice Tourneur’s The Isle of Lost Ships (1923, with Anna Q. Nilsson), and Irvin Willat’s The Isle of Lost Ships (1929, with Virginia Valli). [4]

By contrast, Marriott’s story The Wine of Anubis was not very well known. In it, reporter Tom Harkaway attempts to travel around the world in six months relying only on money that he earns during his journey. In order to generate much-needed cash, Tom accepts a job as a model from a sculptor named Winslow. But Winslow imprisons Tom, who soon realizes that his body is growing weaker and stiffer with each passing day. Winslow is not talented, at least in the field of art; he creates his lifelike sculptures by inducing victims to drink a potion that slowly turns them to stone. His serum is thus the wine of Anubis, a reference to the jackal-headed Egyptian god who protected graves and who helped Isis to embalm Osiris. Anubis guided souls to the afterlife and was commonly linked to mummification.

Thanks to Winslow’s niece Vera, Tom ingests an antidote and regains his health. He kills Winslow’s servant and flees with Vera. In retaliation, Winslow blows up his own home. The tale represents something of an inverse of Greek myths like that of Pygmalion, in which a sculptor breathes life into his own statue. In his study From Hephaistos to the Silver Screen, Vito Adriaensens notes that:

Classical Greek sculpture embraced movement to the extent that it sought to blur the lines between bronze and flesh. The illusion of life that exudes from these idealized frozen bodies was sometimes even complemented by an open mouth that not only fit a narrative context in which the subjects spoke or sang to one another, but could also indicate the process of breath. [5]

For Marriott, life became stone, not the other way around; for him, Winslow was something of a gorgon-like mad scientist.

Though it never seems to have been reprinted or anthologized, The Wine of Anubis somehow managed to survive the yellowing pages of The Blue Book Magazine and adapt into a new form, one that would initially not star Bela Lugosi.

The Black Tower (1932)

In December 1931, newspapers announced that Ralph Murphy — who had written Sh, the Octopus (1928) — had at long last found backing for Murdered Alive, a three-act play that he had written some two years earlier. [6] One newspaper account claimed, "Producers have been afraid to bring it to the boards, considering it too much of a thriller, but since the sensational success of the horror film, Frankenstein, they have changed their minds." [7]

In this case, the producer in question was Ben Stein, who had earlier brought The Jade God (1929) to Broadway. Stolen from an Eastern temple, the jade artifact curses all of those who come into possession of it. Perkins (played by Margaret Wycherly, who starred opposite Lugosi in the 1929 film The Thirteenth Chair) spoke enigmatic lines in a sepulchral tone of voice and walked about in a prescient daze that resembles the somnambulism of Lady Macbeth. [8] Though not a major success, The Jade God made Stein money, enough so that he saw possibilities in Murdered Alive.

A highly unusual character, according to one journalist, Ben Stein was well known for making money in the theatre. He knows more angles about speculators and seat sales than Kate Smith has pounds, the Syracuse Journal once joked. [9] Those angles included retitling Murdered Alive; for Broadway, it became The Black Tower.

The reason for the name change is difficult to determine, but what is clear is that Murphy’s play drew upon The Wine of Anubis, a fact that did not go unnoticed in 1931. Marriott did not receive credit from Murphy or Stein, which may be why some publicity tried to claim The Black Tower was actually based on one of the most unusual cases in European criminology. But while Marriott’s story was clearly a key influence, Murphy’s play was in some respects unique, and perhaps made more so due to Lora Baxter’s involvement in its rewrites. [10]

For the play, Marriott’s Winslow character became not merely an artist, but also a man of science, Dr. Eugene Ludlow. His confederates include a large, African-American henchman (not unlike a character in The Wine of Anubis), and also a fellow scientist, Professor Steiffitz, who concocts the statue-inducing potion. Here seems to be the influence of Frankenstein (1931) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), with Ludlow being depicted as much or more of a mad scientist as he is an artist. Likewise, those films — as well as Dracula (1931) and others — may have prompted the play to focus not on a male victim, as Marriott had, but instead on a female character. Evolutions abounded.

Set in New York, The Black Tower begins at midnight in a lonely spot in Central Park. Acts II and III unfold in the Tower Room of Dr. Ludlow’s country house, far up the Hudson. Its laboratory features all manner of secret doors, sliding panels, and elevators. It is also hermetically sealed and artificially oxygenized. Using a mixture of formaldehyde and other drugs, Ludlow forges his life-like statues as monuments to both art and science, at least until the authorities rescue the kidnapped woman and put an end to his evil-doings. Sidney Salkow staged The Black Tower, which starred Walter Kingsford as Dr. Ludlow. After a tryout in Newark, opening night came at the Sam H. Harris Theatre on January 11, 1932, with the initial performances attended by capacity crowds. [11] However, by the middle of February, the show moved to the Ambassador. [12] By that point, its Broadway competition included Kenneth Webb’s Zombie, one of the inspirations for the Lugosi film White Zombie (1932). Reviewing The Black Tower, the New York Evening Post wrote, with the exception of one or two short-lived and uncomfortable moments, it remains a thriller which does not thrill…Their play is as feeble and puerile an attempt at horrific claptrap as any one could ask for. [13] The Sun was equally harsh, telling readers, "Black Tower brazenly violates every rule.

It introduces insanity for motive, which is rightly forbidden: it gives away everything at the start; it relies entirely on physical action." [14]

By contrast, the World-Telegram was somewhat kinder, noting, it looks like a fair-to-middling hair-raiser. But the newspaper still felt compelled to report that it was "neither as exciting as The Bat or The Thirteenth Chair, nor as enervating as The Ghost Train or The Gorilla." [15]

All that said, the Syracuse Journal conveyed its belief that "the chief complaint seems to be that Black Tower, which was announced as a mystery thriller, turned out to be a mystery thriller. It made people in the audience shrink; it even made one woman faint." [16] Another review doubled that number, claiming two ladies lost consciousness during opening night. [17]

Other journalists saw in The Black Tower something akin to what Ben Stein had seen. The Daily News drew comparisons to the films Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Daily Mirror praised the play’s horrific scenery. [18] But perhaps the most memorable description appeared in the Herald-Tribune: at a critical juncture of the play you are permitted to see one of the doctor’s subjects in a state of near-decomposition, resembling something prematurely arisen from the tomb. [19]

As for the villainous Dr. Ludlow, Walter Kingsford’s portrayal brought him a modicum of acclaim. One newspaper bestowed on him the description of a cool, calculating villain. [20]

Another called him quietly insane. [21] His character was mad, but his portrayal was not maniacal.

When The Black Tower closed in March 1932, the cast had given 72 performances. It had not quite achieved the longevity of The Jade God (which appeared 96 times on Broadway), in some measure because it had never really found an audience.

But there had also been interpersonal problems early in its production, specifically between Ben Stein and Ralph Murphy. Together with Lora Baxter, Murphy brought charges against Stein while The Black Tower was still at the Sam H. Harris Theatre. By that time, Murphy was on RKO’s payroll on the West Coast, but was not so far away to not hear that Stein had the entire third act rewritten without his permission or involvement, apparently to save money on the construction of another set. [22] Stein confessed to making the changes, but argued Murphy’s original ending would have jeopardized the lives of the actors and proven obnoxious to the audience. [23] Relations between the producer and writers never improved.

Los Angeles

Reading a billboard that advertised Bela Lugosi in the play Murdered Alive, child star Jackie Cooper complained, "Huh, there’s no sense to that. He couldn’t be murdered dead, could he? He’d have