Who Was Dracula? (6 page)

I wish you every success tonight. . . . I send you some flowers, two crowns. Will you accept one of them, whichever you think will suit you best? The other, don't think me treacherous . . . please give to Florrie
from yourself.
I should like to think that she was wearing something of mine the first night she comes on the stage, that anything of mine should touch her. . . . You won't think she will suspect? How could she? She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God, how could I?

If the note seemed unnecessarily furtive or conspiratorial, this was probably Wilde's idealism. Within the London theatrical world, his personal theatricality was in ascendance. When he later became a grand hero, and the most condemned of villains, the Stokers would have to learn how to accept him on their own terms.

THE ACTING MANAGER, “DISAGREEABLE THINGS”

F
ussie had been completely spoiled by Henry Irving. “I have caught them often sitting opposite each other at Grafton Street [Irving's flat], just adoring each other!” Ellen Terry wrote. “Occasionally Fussie would thump his tail on the ground to express his pleasure.” The dog dined with Irving and stayed with him at hotels; the hotels that wouldn't accept him were crossed off the tour itinerary. Fussie accompanied the company to theaters, wandered off whenever he wished, and created any amount of trouble. He went missing on trains, boats, and carriages and then inspired frantic searches.

But he was careful to stay off the stage when his master was on it; even Fussie knew his place. Irving loved the limelight even more than he loved his little dog. However, Fussie became confused at a charity performance in New York, where Irving and other actors were performing short scenes. When Irving stepped offstage and put on his coat, the dog assumed that the show was over—this was how it worked at the Lyceum—and he promptly trotted across the stage to find the stage door. Unfortunately, actors John Drew and Maude Adams had just started their domestic scene. Drew watched the fat little terrier screech to a halt, and their eyes locked.

“Is this a dog I see before me?” Drew began to extemporize, reaching his hand out slowly, to lure the pooch. “His tail towards my hand? / Come, let me clutch thee. . . .”

Bram Stoker had even less success when he appeared on the Lyceum stage.

He volunteered as a super for one of those famous crowd scenes. In 1880, Irving offered a spectacular version of Dion Boucicault's 1852 play
The Corsican Brothers
. One of the most popular Victorian melodramas, it offered a little bit of everything: a ghost, a sword duel, revenge, and elaborate settings. When it first premiered, it was one of Queen Victoria's favorite shows, and it became famous for its weird ghost materialization; a special sliding trapdoor, called the Corsican Trap by theater professionals, allowed the ghost to glide across the stage and, at the same time, rise through the floor.

Best of all, the play offered two wonderful roles for Irving, as twin brothers Fabian and Louis de Franchi. A series of doubles, trick costumes, and traps allowed him to magically disappear from one scene and appear in the next, playing both parts.

Irving's Lyceum was infamous for its mishmash of popular crowd-pleasers—like
The Corsican Brothers
—and serious classics, like Shakespeare. Adding to the critics' disdain, Irving treated them all alike, filling the stage with lavish, sometimes gratuitous, artistry. In
The Corsican Brothers
,
one scene included a masked ball in an opera house. Irving used the full depth of his stage, filling it with boxes like a real theater, with the entire set carefully arranged in perspective. When the curtain was raised, the audience at the Lyceum saw a different theater, which appeared to be an even larger one looking back at them!

The setting required hundreds of extras to fill the boxes and prance across the stage, playing revelers at the masked ball. Bram Stoker kept a rack of domino masks and slouch hats in his office so that anyone unoccupied (or any special guests) could be quickly costumed and shoved onto the stage. On one night, Prime Minister Gladstone, who was visiting backstage, took part in the scene.

At a different performance, Stoker donned a mask and a hat with a long plume to become part of the crowd in the opera house. A group of clowns had been booked for the masked ball to add color to the festivities. When they spotted Stoker onstage—their boss—they couldn't resist the temptation of involving him in their comedy. “They seized me and spun me around and literally played ball with me, throwing me from one to the other backwards and forwards.” They rushed him down the footlights, hurtled him back and forth, but wouldn't let him get away. At the end of the scene, Stoker escaped their clutches and reeled into the wings, breathless and dazed.

The next night, when he returned to the stage, the results were even more embarrassing. Attempting to avoid the clowns, Stoker drifted upstage—far away from the audience. Irving was finishing his scene downstage, near the footlights. The actor delivered his final line and then dramatically turned on his heel to take his exit. Approaching Stoker in his costume, the actor's stern expression crumbled and he began to laugh. Fortunately, he was turned away from the audience, so they couldn't see him lose his composure.

Bram was confused and followed his boss into the wings like a hurt puppy. “Stoker, it was you!” Irving let loose a guffaw. “Don't you remember how we arranged the scene?” Irving reminded his Acting Manager how they had used small children in adult costumes at the farthest edge of the stage, to increase the apparent size of the set. This part of the scenery had similarly been built in miniature, a trick of forced perspective. Stoker had inadvertently been standing with these children. Because he was over six feet tall, it gave the impression of a giant milling around the stage. Irving had spotted the transgression and was wondering who could have ruined his scene when he recognized his Acting Manager behind the mask. “You looked fifty feet tall!” Irving told him, wiping tears from his eyes.

Bram Stoker smiled glumly. Fortunately, Irving was laughing.

The story should have been a prophetic warning to Stoker. At the Lyceum, he held his job with a delicate balance of flattery, loyalty, and honest competence. But the calibration was continually being adjusted. When trying too hard to please, it was dangerously easy to be drawn into the wrong setting and ruin Irving's carefully crafted illusions.

Irving would be watching.

—

The Lyceum became famous for a number of important productions.
The Merchant of Venice
opened in 1879, with Henry Irving as a surprisingly ennobled, introspective Shylock and Terry repeating her success as Portia.
Faust
was the long-planned sensation of 1885 and was revived for future seasons. Irving's elaborate
Macbeth
opened three years later. This was the actor's favorite role—he found the mixture of the supernatural, murder, and royal grandeur irresistible. Irving's new Macbeth was not the bold villain of previous actors but darker, self-doubting, and agitated.

Irving avoided the cliché of Scottish tartan and dressed in the armor of prehistoric kings. Ellen Terry offered an equally fascinating Lady Macbeth—not traitorous, not scheming, but desperately trying to gratify her husband, and naive about his potential evil. The play was the result of two brilliant actors, but again, not a collaboration. When Terry was praised for her choices, she admitted to a critic that she'd never had a chance to discuss her character with Irving.

For the role, Terry wore a wig of deep red locks and was dressed in glittering, bejeweled robes that felt mysteriously Middle Eastern. Oscar Wilde, a fan of
Macbeth
and Terry in particular, noted that “Lady Macbeth seems an economical housekeeper and evidently patronizes local industries for her husband's clothes and the servant's liveries, but she takes care to do all her own shopping in Byzantium.” Terry was memorialized as Lady Macbeth in a portrait painted by John Singer Sargent; she wore her iridescent gown and held a gold crown in a death grip.

Henry Irving's first royal command performance was in 1889, before Queen Victoria at Sandringham. The performance was a special challenge for the Lyceum technicians, who supervised building a special twenty-foot-wide stage and scenery that was scaled down to fit. Henry Irving refused any payment for expenses. The Lyceum was closed for that night, and Stoker took charge of a special train car to Sandringham, with a group of actors and technicians—seventy-six people in all.

Irving presented
The Bells
, and then the courtroom scene from
The Merchant of Venice
, which was a fine showcase for Ellen Terry. After the show, Irving and Terry quickly removed their costumes and makeup and dashed down the hall to meet Her Majesty, who complimented them on the production and presented them with jeweled mementos emblazoned with her initials. Irving and Terry then shared supper with the Prince and Princess of Wales. It had been the Queen's first opportunity to see Irving perform, and he later returned for two more command performances.

Bram Stoker didn't overhear the Queen's conversation. “For the rest of the company, supper was prepared in the Conservatory,” he reported later, suggesting where he ended up. Stoker accepted the hierarchy of the evening without comment. “The heads of departments and workmen were entertained in the Housekeeper's room or the Servant's Hall, according to their degrees.”

At one of those later command performances, Stoker felt flattered that Victoria conveyed a message, allowing him to send a telegram from Windsor Castle to the press. As Irving and Terry were ushered into another audience with Her Majesty, the Acting Manager dashed to the telegraph room at Windsor and composed a brief story congratulating his boss. He had learned to savor the warmth from reflected glory.

—

Bram Stoker had earned a reputation of knowing everything that happened at the Lyceum. He was a stickler for organization and decorum, which served him well through his career. He supervised the theater with an iron hand—sometimes literally. One evening during a performance, a lit torch onstage brushed against a piece of scenery, setting it afire. A stagehand quickly saw the problem and stomped out the flame, but a young man in the audience also noticed the fire and dashed from his seat. Stoker saw his panic and was determined to prevent the audience from overreacting. He threw his shoulders back and marched down the aisle, grabbing the man by the throat and turning him around. “Go back to your seat, sir!” he growled. “It is cowards like you who cause death to helpless women!”

Henry Irving would habitually shrug off requests by saying, “Ask Stoker.” In this way Stoker's duties gradually expanded to handle vendors, favors, and employees. Bram Stoker would arrive at the Lyceum during the day, attending to the daily finances and schedule. He replied to correspondence. (At the end of his career, he estimated that he'd written over half a million letters.) He then changed into eveningwear and attended performances, supervising the ushers and hosting guests. After the curtain dropped, when Irving was still energetic and talkative, he accompanied his boss on late-night suppers.

When tours were arranged, it was Stoker scurrying around with railway schedules and tickets, pasting labels inside of train car windows to signal where the Lyceum company should congregate, herding them from carriages to the hotel, and scheduling the scenery to be shipped to the auditoriums. When renovations were made at the Lyceum, Stoker was there to see that Henry Irving's wishes were turned into paint, upholstery, and plasterwork.

Those were his daily duties. Stoker was much prouder when he was called upon for his creativity. He was often asked to write speeches or articles for Irving expressing the actor's views on his art or career. Irving was a good extemporaneous speaker, but he was a much smarter actor; he always wanted to work from a script. He trusted Stoker's insights and literary skills to deliver clear, dependable manuscripts that would satisfy these audiences and burnish his reputation. “He always took precautions with regard to speeches and interviews,” Stoker later wrote. “On occasions where he had to speak quasi-impromptu . . . he learned the speech by heart. When he could have anything before him, such as at dinners, he would have ready his speech carefully corrected, printed in very large type on small pages. . . . This he would place before him on the table.”

Bram Stoker was also asked to read plays, offer his advice to the Governor and Terry about roles, and suggest edits. In this capacity, he had the opportunity to consult with such authors as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Hall Caine on planned scripts.

—

Thomas Hall Caine is generally forgotten today, but he's a fascinating character and had an important influence on Bram Stoker. Caine was a popular Victorian novelist. Although he was born in England, his family was from the Isle of Man, and he spent much of his childhood there. Caine was six years younger than Stoker, but their early lives had many parallels. Just as Stoker began a correspondence with Walt Whitman, Caine wrote confessionary letters to the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was living in London. (It so happened that Rossetti's brother had published Whitman's poetry in an English edition.) Caine later served as Rossetti's secretary and nurse. And, like Stoker, Caine saw a production of Henry Irving's
Hamlet
and wrote a long, effusive review, which earned him a meeting with the actor and inspired their lifelong friendship.

When Caine saw Irving one night in Liverpool, Irving said casually, “Bram is going to join me,” and this was the start of another important friendship. Stoker and Caine shared their literary dreams, swapping stories and plans for books and plays. Hall Caine went on to write dozens of books. His novels became immensely more successful than Stoker's early efforts, bestsellers for the late Victorians. These included
The Deemster
,
The Manxman
,
The Bondsman
,
The Christian
, and
The Prodigal Son
.

Irving tried, for over twenty years, to coerce Caine into writing a script for him, and Caine came very close with several efforts, including a life of Muhammad, a melodrama called
Home, Sweet Home
, and a retelling of the Flying Dutchman saga. But something always interfered. In the case of Muhammad, the Lord Chamberlain's office, who licensed plays, objected before the script was completed, as Muslim subjects would be offended by a depiction of Muhammad. For
Home, Sweet Home
, Irving listened carefully to the plot but objected to playing the character because he was too tall, telling Caine, it appears seriously, “There is no general sympathy on the stage for tall old men.” (When Irving later played a sad old man in a different play, he did it stooped over or slouched in his chair.)