by Mark Dery
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By ’76, Gorey’s career, if not his love life, was on a roll.
Wulp had at last gotten the professional rights to Dracula, raised the money to mount a production, and rounded up some coproducers. Dennis Rosa, who’d directed the Nantucket show, was back in the director’s seat. Frank Langella, then a svelte, dark-haired lady-killer, would play the title role. Gorey would redesign his sets for Broadway.
On October 20, 1977, “the Edward Gorey production of Dracula,” as everyone insisted on referring to it, opened at the Martin Beck Theatre to almost universal acclaim.b Receiving the marquee treatment in the PR campaign gave Gorey the fantods: “It makes me feel quite faint and utterly far away,” he moaned.24 Still, it was inevitable: Langella got top billing in the program, but Gorey’s stunning sets stole the show.
Always ill at ease in the spotlight, Gorey tried to brush off the accolades by belittling his sets as amateur efforts, pointing out, “It’s the first time I’ve ever designed a Broadway show.”25 True enough, although he had, in a sense, been apprenticing as a stage designer. He’d designed the Nantucket production, of course, and in 1975 he’d done the costumes and backdrop for act 2 of Swan Lake for a production by the Long Island–based Eglevsky Ballet.
Reviewing that performance for the New York Times, Don McDonagh dismissed the ballerina and dancer who danced the pas de deux as “not one of the most memorable pairings” but was lavish in his praise of Gorey’s talents. “What was of uncommon interest was the scenery, which had a haunted feeling of mischief as much as menace,” wrote McDonagh. “The lake had a darkened castle on a small island and a large brooding cloud that suggested a bird of prey with the hint of a swan trapped between its wing and head. It was fiendishly effective, and one wonders why no one has tapped Mr. Gorey’s considerable talent for ballet design before now for our major companies.”26 Finally, he’d done the backdrop for a production of Giselle mounted in early ’77 by Peter Anastos’s troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. In her New Yorker review, Arlene Croce praised the Gorey decor, a “sorrowful vista dominated by weeping willows and dotted with funeral urns.”27
Gorey’s first order of business, in reimagining the Dracula sets for the Martin Beck Theatre, was scaling up to Broadway proportions the versions designed for the shoe-box stage of the Cyrus Peirce Middle School. The arched, cryptlike vault that framed all three acts had to be blown up from twelve to thirty-five feet in height, as did the scenery nestled within it, which changed with each act. (In addition to the masterstroke of adding a jot of red to each black-and-white scene, another flash of ingenuity on Gorey and Rosa’s part was the use of the vault’s arches as frames into which the backdrops for each act—plugs, as the canvas-covered inserts are called in the trade—could be slotted.)28
Gorey redrew the sets on a quarter-inch-to-a-foot scale (as opposed to the standard half-inch-to-a-foot ratio) to avoid “acres of cross-hatching,” then handed his sketches off to Lynn Pecktal, the scenic supervisor, who oversaw the building and painting of the sets.29 Pecktal marveled at the fine-grained detail of “the books [in Dr. Seward’s library], the wallpaper in the bedroom, the coffin scene, full architectural sketches, stonework, statues, all of that.” Gorey’s scenery, which cost one-eighth of the show’s budget, was “more lavish and detailed than is usual on Broadway,” Mel Gussow noted in his New York Times Magazine profile of Gorey.30
Writ large, Gorey’s obsessively crosshatched drawings, with skulls and bats hidden everywhere, were breathtaking. In act 1, set in the library in Dr. Seward’s sanatorium, every leather-bound volume was lovingly rendered, as were the bats and skeletons flanking the good doctor’s fireplace. In Lucy’s boudoir, the setting for act 2, the drapes of her four-poster were held aloft by bat-winged putti; black-and-white pansies with death’s-head faces writhed, serpentlike, out of vases embellished with skeletons. And in the third act, set in the burial vault where Dracula sleeps in his coffin, mummified corpses reposed in niches and Gorey’s bat-winged, vampire-fanged skulls adorned the pillars. The costumes, too, delivered witty asides: Dracula’s watch chain was strung with teeth (canines, naturally), and the lunatic Renfield wore striped asylum pajamas with bat-shaped buttons and Goreyesque sneakers with bat silhouettes on their toes.
In Gorey’s work, “decor becomes description,” as Gussow insightfully pointed out. “Between bindings, he is his own stage and costume designer as well as author and director.…Theatrical design was a natural next step.”31 Of course, being Gorey, he would do the unexpected thing, and in his Dracula scenery, he did just that, creating sets that dance on the line—there’s that betwixt-and-between theme again—between bringing the book’s illustrations to life and transposing the play into the black-and-white flatland of the printed page. As always in Gorey’s aestheticized worldview, life imitates art more than art imitates life.
Reviewers, with very few exceptions, swooned over Gorey’s sets. Newsweek judged them “magnificently macabre” and “spiked with irony,” “all in blacks and whites and grays, as if the blood had been drained from them.”32 “Dazzled and dominated” by Gorey’s set, Time’s reviewer concluded that, while the cast acquitted itself well, “the show belongs first, last, and almost always to Gorey and Langella,” presumably in that order.33
One of those very few exceptions, to no one’s surprise, was the invincibly nasty John Simon, a theater critic who specialized in malice toward all but especially toward women, whose physical quirks he caricatured with waspish cruelty. And gays: he derided The Octette Bridge Club by P. J. Barry as “faggot nonsense” and was heard to observe, in a theater lobby, “Homosexuals in the theater! My God, I can’t wait until AIDS gets all of them.”34 The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who is gay, thinks “a lot of the things that he identifies with gay sensibility are certain kinds of irony, a sense of talking in quotation marks, and what we often call camp…”35 Thus when Simon sniffed, in his New York magazine review of Dracula, that “camp is there even before the actors commence: in Edward Gorey’s sets,” he’s insinuating there’s something queer about the ironic-gothic, comic-macabre vibe they give off.36 Deploring Gorey’s “misguided” decision to blow his drawings “up to mammoth size,” he writes, “Now, Gorey drawings are fine in their proper place and format; here they look like postage stamps carrying on as if they were Picasso’s Guernica—a sort of farcical megalomania that is the essence of camp.”37
Whatever camp is—and in Simon’s case it seems to be the gnawing fear that everyone gay is in on a joke that he doesn’t get—it isn’t “farcical megalomania.” Nevertheless, he raises a legitimate point: Is Gorey’s brilliantly understated wit of a piece with its miniaturist aesthetic? Does it lose its charm when translated to “mammoth size”?
One member of Dracula’s audience agreed with Simon wholeheartedly, and that theatergoer was Gorey. He went to see a preopening rehearsal at the Wilbur Theatre, in Boston—the play opened out of town, as shows often do, in hopes of working out the kinks before running the critical gauntlet in New York—and was horrified when he saw his drawings enlarged to monstrous proportions. “I practically had cardiac arrest, is what I practically had,” he told Dick Cavett. “I felt the scale was wrong, that I should have done them on a larger scale. I don’t like blown-up drawing very much.…I think some kind of monumentality crept into the set, which I wasn’t prepared for.”38
He was the odd man out. In 1978, Gorey was up for a Tony Award for best set design and best costume design. But Dracula nabbed two other Tonys, one for most innovative production of a revival and one for costume design. “That was one of the more preposterous things,” he kvetched in 1996. “I did all of eight costumes and they were zilch but everybody loved the sets. There was somebody else who deserved the set design award much more than I did that year, so they didn’t feel like they could give that one to me. They gave me the costume award instead.”39 Gorey couldn’t be bothered to attend the awards ceremony. (“I was off at the movies somew
here, probably,” was his only explanation.)40 He gave his Tony to a friend.c
He did manage, however, to cash the fat checks he received from the box-office proceeds. “He made a ton of money,” confirms Peter Wolff, his lawyer friend from the Balanchine scene, who reviewed Gorey’s contract for Dracula. Not that much lawyering was required: Wulp wanted to ensure that Gorey was well rewarded for his work on the play. It was his idea that Ted should receive 10 percent of the profits from Dracula. If that sounds extraordinary for a set designer, it is. Wulp explains the unusual arrangement with the shrugging admission, “I liked Edward. I really liked him. He was fun. And I loved the way Dracula looked…and I loved the fact that he disliked it so much.…I think I probably said to him, ‘Well, you might not like it, but it really made you well off.’”
That it did. The show ran for almost three years, closing on January 6, 1980, after 925 performances, during which time Gorey’s checks kept coming. Dracula earned “in excess of $2 million,” the New York Times reported.41 There were touring companies in the States, too, and in ’78 a short run in England, which, while not terribly successful from a producer’s-eye view, earned Gorey £42,000 for the rights to his set designs.
Andreas Brown, always quick off the mark maximizing the commercial potential of Gorey’s work, created a merchandising outfit to market “I saw Dracula” T-shirts, Dracula tote bags, and other tie-in merchandise. (The artist, with his usual wry pessimism, named it Doomed Enterprises.) “I got lawyers and agents and merchandisers—the whole schmear,” said Gorey.42 Brown mounted an exhibition in the Gotham gallery of his set designs and costume drawings, ringing up more than $17,000 in sales in the first week.
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Gorey was anointed a demicelebrity by the mainstream media. There were profiles in mass-circulation glossies such as Us and People, which wondered, in its implacably middlebrow way, if Gorey would turn out to be the “Charles Schulz of the macabre,” a prospect that must’ve struck terror in his heart.43 In December of ’77, he made his only appearance on a nationally broadcast TV talk show, The Dick Cavett Show, wearing blue jeans and radiantly grimy Keds and, God knows why, a heavy sweater, which ensured that he glittered with sweat under the hot lights. Trying to put his foot-joggling, finger-twiddling subject at ease, Cavett adopted a glib, bantering manner, asking if he hadn’t been “lured into garages by strange people.” “No,” came the wary reply. “Any more than the average child? Any more than I was?” Cavett pressed. “I think less,” Gorey rejoined. “I don’t remember ever being lured anywhere by anybody.”44
Bill Cunningham, the New York Times photographer whose photos of New Yorkers flaunting their personal styles were a city institution until his death, in 2016, devoted his January 11, 1978, column to Gorey, juxtaposing one of Gorey’s self-portraits, from The Chinese Obelisks, with photos of him loping around the city in some of his twenty fur coats. “In the beginning, when he was relatively unknown, he contented himself with a vintage raccoon,” writes Cunningham. By the ’70s, he notes, “Mr. Gorey was no longer a relative unknown. He was no longer even a cult figure.…By the time the curtain went up on the year 1978, there was Mr. Gorey, a fur cry from his old pelt, swathed in Russian sable.”45
Ben Kahn Furs, a New York City furrier, got in on the act, commissioning Gorey to design a line of thirty-odd fur coats for men, which premiered in ’79. “I purposely did slightly more bizarre ideas,” said Gorey. “There was no use doing sketches of conventional coats, though I’d say there are plenty of fairly conventional things in the collection.”46 Representative of the fairly unconventional things in the Gorey line was a jacket inspired by a letterman’s sweater, made of nutria dyed red, and, of course, a Dracula-inspired cape, “a voluminous, black broadtail affair lined in red silk,” as the New York Times described it.47
Seventy-eight also saw Gorey stage-managing the design of a window display, late one night in early July, for Henri Bendel, the chic Fifth Avenue retailer of women’s fashion. He oversaw the strategic placement, on black-clad mannequins, of his homemade bats and frogs, hand-sewn and stuffed with rice. Another Goreyesque touch was what the Times described as “unborn creatures called Pheetus Pairdew”—another beanbag creation—nestled here and there.48 (The name is a Gorey in-joke, a phonetic rendering of “fetus perdu”—or lost fetus.) “The windows are unreal,” said a passerby the next morning. “The clothes are unreal. Would you wear anything so ghastly?”
Even more ghastly was something called A Gorey Halloween, an ABC children’s special that was broadcast, inexplicably, on October 30, 1978. Based—very loosely—on Gorey’s characters, it had something to do with four children in a haunted mansion and included a two-minute segment titled “The Gilded Bat,” which had nothing to do with The Gilded Bat, although it did feature Allegra Kent flapping about in a bat costume. The show starred “the most obnoxious assortment of child actors,” Faith Elliott recalls. “Among the pieces they desecrated was The Doubtful Guest. I remember some kid continuously shouting, ‘Benjamin! Where’s Benjamin?’”49
Seventy-eight was Gorey’s moment. Robert Cooke Goolrick had anticipated his breakthrough when he wrote, in the March 1976 issue of New Times magazine, “After 25 quiet years, Gorey is a hot act. Prices for first editions have shot up, prices for drawings have doubled.…The ubiquitous Peter Bogdanovich is interested in movie rights. Money is being raised for a film of Gorey’s one un-illustrated prose work, a silent film script called The Black Doll. Cultists fume while the Gotham and Putnam’s cash registers jingle. Andreas Brown chuckles and says, ‘There is about to be in this country a Gorey explosion.’ And at the center of it all stands Edward Gorey himself, who cocks his head with shy, quizzical amusement: ‘A Gorey explosion? How very apt. Little bits of me all over the place…’”50
By ’78, little bits of him were all over the place. There he was in Cunningham’s column, and in Henri Bendel’s windows, and in Ben Kahn’s latest line of furs for men, and in “Dracula Damask” wallpaper from Kirk-Brummel Associates, based on the bat-infested wallpaper seen in Lucy’s boudoir, and on ABC—to a minus effect—in A Gorey Halloween, and in Fête Diverse, ou Le Bal de Madame H—, the ballet whose scenario, costumes, and scenery he’d cooked up for the Eglevsky company. Then, too, there was his latest book, The Green Beads, and of course Dracula, which was still packing them in. “There is some talk about an Edward Gorey boutique in a major department store and a model room designed by Mr. Gorey,” the New York Times reported. “If it all works out, 1978 may be the year of the haunted house look.”51
But his crowning achievement, as far as he was concerned, was Gorey Stories, the musical revue based on his books that opened off-Broadway in December of ’77 and moved to Broadway in October of the following year.
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A series of songs and sketches based on Gorey classics such as The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Doubtful Guest, Gorey Stories was conceived by Stephen Currens, an actor who got the brain wave of adapting Gorey’s little books for the stage. The composer David Aldrich provided Victorian-Edwardian musical settings. The show went over like gangbusters when they mounted a production, in ’74, at the University of Kentucky, where both Aldrich and Currens were students. Currens set his sights on New York. Slow dissolve to opening night, December 8, 1977, at the WPA Theatre, an off-Broadway house in Manhattan. The New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, ever the Gorey booster, proclaimed the show a “merrily sinister musical collage of Goreyana” whose libretto showcased “Gorey the gifted writer” of prose that’s “as intricate and as elegant as his spidery pictures.”52 The scenery, “a neat black and red checkerboard set,” was intended merely to invoke “the master’s haunting world,” not re-create it down to the last crosshatch; the spotlight was on Gorey’s writing.
Gorey was as charmed by Gorey Stories as he’d been underwhelmed by Dracula. “I saw it four times,” he said. “If someone had told me I would have to put anything of mine on stage, I would have said it wasn’t possible, but they
did a fine job with the stories, and the music is very good.…What they didn’t attempt with Gorey Stories was to make it look like my work particularly.”53
John Wulp threw his hat in the ring as producer, along with Harry Rigby (the same Harry Rigby who’d dreamed of taking Dracula to Broadway), among others. Gorey would design new sets and costumes; Lynn Pecktal would reprise his Dracula role of scenic supervisor. Descriptions of Gorey’s scenery are hard to come by, but he told the Times that the sets would consist of “an abstract room and an abstract summer house, and while they will be in color, they will not exactly be the colors of the rainbow.”54
Gorey Stories (subtitled An Entertainment with Music) opened at the Booth Theatre on October 30, 1978, after fifteen preview performances. Then, in a twist of fate straight out of a Gorey story, it closed that same evening. Consensus holds that it was done in by an ill-timed strike by the city’s newspaper pressmen, as they were called. The presses that produced New York’s three major dailies had stopped rolling, obliterating any hope of reviews. As a result, the show sank like Little Zooks, the unloved infant in A Limerick who drowns in a lily-choked pond. Those reviews that did appear, published after the strike ended, on November 5, by which time Gorey Stories was history, suggest that the show wouldn’t have lasted long on Broadway even without a newspaper strike. Clive Barnes, writing in the New York Post, applauded Gorey Stories as “unique, odd, perverse, and engagingly entertaining” but thought it was “theatrical” without being “theater,” asserting that Gorey’s work simply didn’t lend itself to the stage—a charge that would be leveled at the nonsense “entertainments” he mounted on the Cape in his late, semiretired years.55
Such criticisms would dog subsequent attempts to adapt Gorey for the theater, such as Tinned Lettuce (1985), Amphigorey (1994), and The Gorey Details (2000). In Gorey’s work, word and image form an artistic gestalt; the combined effect is greater than that of text or illustration alone. Watching the cast of Gorey Stories chirping out a sprightly choral reading of The Gashlycrumb Tinies makes you realize, in an instant, just how indispensable his drawings are to the pleasures of his work.