My Best Fiend: Part III

Béla Lugosi defined Dracula — and vampires in general — for a generation.  For several generations, actually.  The thick Romanian accent.  The evening clothes and cape.  The courtly, old-world manners.  All delineated the vampire “type” that dominated in film and imagination throughout the middle part of the last century.

He was amazingly well-suited for the part:  originally Béla Blaskó, he took his stage name from the town of Lugoj in Western Transylvania (now Romania) where he was born.  He began his acting career on the Hungarian stage playing Shakespeare, and in 1917 appeared in his first silent picture, also in that country.  He would appear in eleven more before being banned from acting, and forced to emigrate to Germany to find work.  Finally, he entered the United States (illegally in 1920, then through Ellis Island in early ‘21), where he began to find acting work.

Lugosi’s association with blood-suckery came about in 1928, when he was chosen to star in the authorized Broadway version of Dracula. It was a huge hit with both critics and the public, so much so that a couple of years later, Carl Laemmle Jr. — head of production at Universal, the studio his father built — began pre-production on a film version.  Despite the popularity of Lugosi in the stage play, he wanted Lon Chaney to play the title role, but that was short-circuited by Chaney’s death of cancer before production began.  Lugosi starred in the role that would forever define him and, eventually perhaps, destroy him as well.

Although Dracula made him a household name, and earned him a contract with Universal, Lugosi was forever after typecast in horror roles. Over the next five years, he made Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Raven, and  White Zombie.  In 1936, Universal quit making horror pictures for a few years, and he was consigned to the B-unit, where he had parts in low-bdget-thrillers, often just to provide name value.  In 1939 his career took an uptick, when he played Ygor opposite Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein, but he was soon relegated back to the B-stable and the occasional Poverty Row production.

At about the same time, Lugosi developed chronic sciatica, for which the doctors prescribed opiates; as he became dependent upon the drugs — and as the addiction deepened — his roles in movies became fewer and further between.  His last role in a major motion picture was as, ironically, Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  By that time he was considered such a poor risk because of his drug habit that even his appearances in obscure, low-budget flicks dried up.

I wonder what would have happened if Lugosi had been working today?  His role in Dracula won him a studio contract that doubtless kept the wolves at least partially at from his door.  Without that studio-system safety net, and with his thick Romanian accent that severely limited his roles, could he have survived?  On the other hand, in this age of immediate gratification, I can’t imagine Universal would have waited five years for a sequel (for Dracula’s Daughter, which didn’t star Lugosi anyway).  Would the continued, A-picture work have helped keep him from oblivion?  Would it somehow have prevented him from falling into the near-bottomless pit of drug addled obscurity?

There’s one bizarre coda to Lugosi’s story.  In the early 50s, when he’d reached what AA calls rock bottom, he came to the attention of schlock-meister Ed Wood, the angora-wearing director of Night of the Ghouls, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love and the immortal Take it Out in Trade. Wood had long been a fan of Lugosi, and when he found him living in poverty and near-anonymity, gave him roles in movies like Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster.

During this period, Wood shot some silent footage of Lugosi in his Dracula costume outside the homes of some of his friends.  After Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956, Wood used some of this footage — interspersed with shots of his wife’s chiropractor with a cape over his face — in the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space. Thus, in a sense, Lugosi’s last role was not even his own.