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uglycousin2
march 2007 |
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uglycousin2
march 2007 |
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Love Me With Those Blood-Red Lips
by
Maggie Jaffe
Before his interest in boys, Oscar Wilde proposed to Florence Balcombe, "a celebrated beauty," but she chose Dracula over Dorian Gray by marrying Bram Stoker in 1878. Her portrait will be exhibited in the Royal Academy of Art, the same year that Wilde is convicted of sodomy. Stoker, who is Irish, imagines Dracula as the unclean Other: Romani, Gypsy or Jew. For Victorian England, D is chilling proof of the invasion of "foreign blood": syphilis, cholera, Asiatic flu. Although Darwin profoundly shook up his contemporaries, his Origin of the Species provides Stoker limitless imaginative possibilities. His Monster can shape shift into a bat, a wolf, into any damned thing he wants. Convinced that Jack the Ripper is Jewish, race riots rip through East London, and the Jewish quarter is nearly burned to the ground. In response, Ripper submits his "poem" to Scotland Yard: I'm not a butcher, I'm not a Yid Nor yet a foreign skipper, But I'm your own light-hearted friend, Yours truly, Jack the Ripper. Henry Irving, the Shakespearean actor, so impressed Stoker that he'll insist that Irving star as the blood-obsessed Count in the first London production. Stoker's friends suggest that his "real" marriage is to Henry, and not to Florence. After Irving's death, a stroke will leave Stoker unconscious for days. Stoker dies in 1912, April 20th (Hitler's birthday), of tertiary syphilis. In his last essay he writes that sex, of all the emotions, causes humans the most grievous harm. In other words, Stoker, unlike the Count, is a lousy lay. Perhaps Florence's so-called frigidity was merely prudence. The week of Stoker's death, the Titanic runs aground, and angry citizens break into his tomb in Highgate Cemetery and drive a stake through the corpse's heart. Marx is also buried in Highgate, but in unhallowed ground—not because he's a Marxist but because he's a Jew. After Stoker's demise, Florence claims all rights to Dracula. She's earned it. Initially, she won't allow Universal to film Dracula. Years later, a zealous lawyer finds a loophole in the copyright laws. Dracula is—and always was—in the public domain, at least in the U.S. Lawsuits abound. Production begins. Todd Browning, a fall-down drunk, is to direct the film, and of course, the lead role goes to Bela Lugosi. During World War I, Bela served in the Hungarian army where he was wounded. He later claims to be "emotionally unfit" for service when reassigned to the front. Lugosi's morphine addiction begins with his war wound, and he'll shoot up morphine for the next forty years. Is the spike in his veins symbolic of the spike through his heart? Of Christ nailed to the cross? Bela was a Bleeder not a Believer. Always health conscious, he would drink raw vegetables and eat only uncooked meat. After being de-mobbed, he joins the Hungarian Communist Party and founds the actor's union. Flees to Germany for political reasons, where he plays Chingachgook, the Noble Savage, in a 1920 production of The Last of the Mohicans. Later, in freedom-loving America, HUAC will interrogate him, but despite his penchant for blood, he denies any previous association with the Reds. Lugosi never called Karloff a "Limey cocksucker who doesn't deserve to smell my shit," as Tim Burton's Ed Wood suggests. In fact, all five of his wives agree that he never used foul language and was a perfect gentleman to the bitter end.
Bad luck follows most of the cast. By 1965, Mina, played by Helen Chandler, is severely burned because of her penchant for drinking and smoking in bed. Her money gone, no one will claim her ashes. Screenwriter Garrett Fort dies of an overdose, and Dwight Frye, who plays Renfield, has to supplement his income by working as a machinist. His obit lists him of all things as a "toolmaker." And Bela dies flat broke in bed while reading The Final Curtain, an aborted screenplay. After seeing Dracula as a kid, my dreams were in black, white and blood. I would gladly trade my existence in New York for Transylvania, rattling around the castle with the Count, staunching his blood, holding his needle steady. He in turn would lick me all over with his engorged red lips. Because the dead are more human, unlike the living. _______________________________ Information about Bela Lugosi is gleaned from David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, 1990. Information about Jack the Ripper is taken from Sander L. Gilman's "'I'm Down on Whores': Race and Gender in Victorian London," from Anatomy of Racism, edited by David Theodor Goldberg, 1990. The photograph of the three Brides of Dracula was scanned from David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic.
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