Who Was Dracula? (25 page)

Meanwhile, audiences continued to flock to London, where
Dracula
ran for over 250 performances before going back on the road. The demand was so high that Deane organized three separate touring companies. The play also boosted interest in the novel, which had been floundering but now sold twenty thousand copies a year.

Through it all, the checks kept arriving at Florence Stoker's flat.

—

The publisher and Broadway producer Horace Liveright arrived in London in early 1927 and watched
Dracula
at the Little Theatre four times. He loved it. He hated it. He had to have it in New York.

He discussed a deal with Florence Stoker for the American rights, insisting that the Deane script would have to be rewritten for Broadway. Then he secured the services of American playwright John Balderston to do the rewriting and to handle the tricky negotiations with the impatient widow.

The American
Dracula
, which opened on Broadway in October 1927, was no more ambitious, but Liveright and Balderston had smoothed out some of the ridiculous dialogue. They also eliminated characters and added some of their own gimmicks. For example, an actress would sneak from backstage into the audience in the darkness and then groan loudly, on cue, as Dracula attacked his victim. It sounded as if a poor woman watching the show had been overcome with emotion. At the end of the play, Dr. Van Helsing now stepped forward to deliver a novel curtain speech: “Just a word before you go. We hope that the memories of Dracula and Renfield won't give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight and the lights have been turned out . . . and you dread to see a face appear at the window . . . why, just pull yourself together and remember that, after all, there
are
such things!”

Liveright had offered to bring Raymond Huntley, the Count, and Bernard Jukes, the lunatic Renfield, to America. Jukes accepted, but Huntley balked at the weekly salary of $125. Instead, the role went to a Romanian actor who was just starting his career on Broadway, Belá Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó, who used the stage name Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi's English was spotty. He was uneven and strange in reciting his lines. As Liveright watched him rehearse, the producer wondered if he'd made the right choice. But when the actor finally had an audience, he summoned a weird, imperious snarl and a threatening, erotic energy. It was the role that made him famous and, indeed, he was the actor that made Dracula famous.

Dracula had been completely reinvented for this generation. Lugosi's patent leather hair and penetrating eyes were perfect reminders of Rudolph Valentino—the famously exotic silent film star who had created a mania among American women with his smoldering stare and cruel sexuality. In 1926, Valentino died unexpectedly. A year later, he had been resurrected as Dracula—part lover, part corpse. (Lugosi was given dark rings around his eyes and pale green makeup for Broadway.) Gone was Stoker's white-haired, snarling old nobleman. Dracula was now a 1920s heartthrob.

Another element of the play's success was its unexpected perspective. In the early 1920s, Broadway had been overrun with a series of supernatural thrillers like
The Cat and the Canary
,
The Bat
, and
The Spider
. These were basically detective stories in which a logical explanation was offered for the phenomena and a criminal was unmasked before the final curtain.
Dracula
thrilled by being unabashedly supernatural and never offering an excuse or a denouement.

Van Helsing's speech accentuated this element. To many in the audience, the thrill of the evening was the reminder that “there
are
such things.”

—

The reviewers were cautious, as if they were in on the joke.
Vogue
magazine wrote, “The shoddiness of the production and the performances may add to the merriment, may, indeed, create it. If the piece were better done, it might not be so amusing.”
Time
thought that “the material is morbidly magnificent. And, of course, it is all perfectly silly.” The
New York
Daily Mirror
compared it to a child wearing a bedsheet and shouting boo. The
New Yorker
thought it might be better without so much “arrant hokum.” But Alexander Woollcott seemed to get into the spirit of the production when he pronounced, “Ye who have fits, prepare to throw them now.”

And, of course,
Dracula
on Broadway was an enormous hit.

—

Hollywood called.

The success of the play meant that it was impossible to ignore the commercial possibilities of
Dracula
. After interest from a number of studios, Universal emerged victorious, even though the head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, thought the idea of producing horror films was “morbid.” It was his son, Carl Laemmle Jr., the heir apparent, put in charge of the studio when he was twenty-one, who liked the idea.

Lon Chaney, the famous silent film star and “Man of a Thousand Faces,” was reportedly slated for the role of Dracula before Chaney's unexpected death. The producers weren't interested in Bela Lugosi, who was considered strictly a stage star without any motion picture appeal. Lugosi actually contacted Mrs. Stoker to help negotiate the film rights and ingratiate himself to the studio.

Unfortunately, the rights were now hopelessly muddled between the original novel and three separate theater scripts, thanks to Mrs. Stoker's machinations. Just as
Dracula
seemed hopelessly doomed to a legal comedy of errors, slowly, mysteriously, the clouds parted on the vampire's full moon.

Lugosi was signed for the cut-rate price of $500 per week, for a total of $3,500. Florence Stoker accepted $60,000.

Universal Studio's
Dracula
may be one of the worst “great” films ever made. Tod Browning, the director of Lon Chaney's best films, was signed to direct. Edward Van Sloan reprised his Broadway role of Van Helsing. Dwight Frye, a Hollywood character actor, made the leering, laughing character of Renfield famous. But by the time the script had passed through the hands of various Hollywood writers, it was a messy pastiche of both the novel and the play. Now it is Renfield who goes to Transylvania to meet the Count—and is attacked there by Dracula, not the mysterious brides. This leaves the character of Jonathan Harker almost nothing to do. After the impressionistic scenes in Transylvania and at Dracula's castle, for which the film is fondly remembered, the action shifts to London and apes the drawing-room scenes of Hamilton Deane's script.

If the film
Dracula
charms, it is with its otherworldly qualities. It offers none of the self-conscious fun of the Broadway show; rather, it is now dire and perfectly serious. Lugosi is fascinating and strange. The dialogue is sparse and odd. The action is slow and trancelike. The film crackles and hisses in silence, without a note of background music. It ends with a whimper, the thud of an offscreen stake. Van Helsing's famous curtain speech was filmed, to leave the audience with a smile, but later omitted from prints.

The movie opened in February 1931. Reviews were mixed. The
Los Angeles Times
thought that it was “plainly a freak picture,” a “curiosity devoid of the important element of sympathy that causes the widest appeal.” And, of course, it was a sensational hit.

The film doubled its investment in the first year and was revived, regularly, after that. Junior Laemmle, a film executive who never gave the appearance of being very smart, ended up looking like a genius when it came to
Dracula
. It began a trend for horror that clawed Universal Studios out of the Depression;
Frankenstein
followed that same year, then
The Mummy
, and a series of famous monster sequels whenever ready cash was needed.

—

Dracula served Florence magnificently. “You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already.”

Hamilton Deane and Universal Studios allowed her to end her life with some luxuries, including the addition of a second-story gallery in her home. Florence Stoker died in 1937 and left an estate of almost 7,000 pounds ($35,000), considerably more than Bram Stoker had left at the time of his death.

—

And then, of course, it had to happen. Maybe it was poetic justice.

In March 1939, when Hamilton Deane's
Dracula
returned to London at the Winter Garden for another West End run, the producer used the American script. After years of playing Van Helsing opposite dozens of Draculas, Deane also took the plummier role of the vampire. When the show was extended and had to move, Deane searched at the last moment for available space—and found it at Henry Irving's old Lyceum.

The 1939 engagement seemed a spiderweb of haunted coincidences. Stoker's and Irving's ghosts, presumably, watched Dracula strut across their old stage. Hamilton Deane donned the opera cape to be the famous Count. And then, Bela Lugosi, in London for a movie, stepped onstage at the conclusion of one performance. That's where he met Deane for the first time. The two Draculas embraced and shared a bow. After
Dracula
, John Gielgud's
Hamlet
played at the Lyceum—Gielgud was Ellen Terry's nephew, and Hamlet was not only Irving's most famous role but the first part he played with Ellen Terry.

After
Hamlet
, the Lyceum was shuttered when the city announced plans to demolish it to widen the road. The theater sat empty for over a decade and then reopened as a ballroom. In 1996 it was fully restored, and it hosted Disney's
Lion King
in 1999.

—

Just months after he completed the film
Dracula
, Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in
Frankenstein
, feeling that the growling, snarling character would be limiting.
Frankenstein
, of course, made the unknown British character actor Boris Karloff a star. Lugosi's refusal to consider the role of Frankenstein was a special poetic justice; Raymond Huntley's refusal to take the role of
Dracula
on Broadway had once opened the door for Lugosi.

Lugosi was both blessed and doomed by the role of Dracula. He was hopelessly typecast but always able to draw an audience if he put on the famous cape. He played a series of horror roles and
Dracula
-inspired sequels, and in always-popular revivals of the play. In 1956, when Lugosi died, he'd suffered a series of decreasing, desperate movie roles and was emaciated by drug addiction. He was buried in his Dracula cape. It was, his son and former wife decided, the way he would have wanted it.

Hamilton Deane played Dracula until 1941, when he retired from the stage. He died in 1958.

—

Bram Stoker's monster appears on only sixty-two of 390 pages of the novel; he makes only a few speeches; he almost never shares his insights or motivation; his appearance is indistinct to the point of being confusing. Late in the novel, he becomes virtually lost in the torrent of diary entries, speculation, and itineraries generated by the vampire hunters. He turns into a vague disease, a pestilence that can be countered with scientific thinking and careful planning. He may be more of a tragic hero than a villain, but he is also more of a miasma than a human being.

“
Dracula
with so very little of Dracula” may have been Bram Stoker's greatest achievement. It meant that the Count has to be interpreted by the reader—characteristics need to be filled in; thoughts and motivations need to be inferred. This is what has made the search for Stoker's inspirations—like Irving, Wilde, Whitman, Jack the Ripper—not only a fascinating puzzle but a key to understanding the author.

The absence of Dracula has always offered another opportunity. The story could be reinvented, generation after generation, with new interpretations of the vampire. Dusted of its Victorianisms, the play could be easily planted in a 1920s London drawing room or a 1980s tract house. Removed from medieval Transylvania, Dracula could be re-created in the image of his latest audience—or even better, in the image of their nightmares.

Even if his skills as an author were limited, Stoker's personality left him open to the famous people that surrounded him, quietly observing their traits, synthesizing their weaknesses, and combining their tragedies. Stoker organized these into a new kind of nightmare: Whitman's bold carnality, Oscar Wilde's corrupting immorality, Henry Irving's haunted characters, and Jack the Ripper's mysterious horrors. These historical references elude us because those nightmares have passed from our memory and we don't need them anymore. We've replaced them with our own.

Even if Bram Stoker never fully realized it, if his views on censorship belied it,
Dracula
is about sex. The vampire story is a surrogate for sex. It's always a tempting adventure for readers who aren't otherwise allowed to think about sex.

Author Maurice Richardson, in attempting to psychoanalyze the novel, famously described it in 1959 as a “kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match.” A better way to express it is that
Dracula
can be almost anything we want, whenever we want it. Gabriel Ronay described the book as a “weathervane indicating the direction of the prevalent social winds.” And the old vampire was right. Time is on his side.

—

Anne Rice's 1976 book
Interview with the Vampire
(and her subsequent series of books,
The Vampire Chronicles
) reinvented the genre by recognizing the fascinating, seemingly eternal life and passing relationships that must constitute a truly great vampire's life. Dracula seemed to be unaware of his centuries of victims—one meal after another. But Rice's Louis has all the insights of a great diarist, or, perhaps, a food critic who can recall the details of every delicious bite.