“And it never was so again. You cared nothing for her gift, her talent, so she seared it from her throat in front of you.” The Wolf Man made a guttural whine of pain. “Then you told me she was dead. I was just a boy of six. You kept us apart for years until she found me again.”
“Once you knew of her existence, you left me, Creighton.”
“Which was fine with you. You never wanted me to go on the stage, on the screen, as you never wanted her to sing. She destroyed her gift in her pain at your not valuing it. Or her.”
“After I was dead, you started acting, not as Creighton Chaney for long. Then you called yourself ‘Lon’ and tacked a ‘Junior’ on your name at the order of the studio bosses.”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be my own man, as my mother had wanted to be her own woman. I wanted to outdo your career for her sake. I struggled to escape B movies, and did, a bit, but your legend mired us both in paths that hurt us.”
“I didn’t put the bi-chloride of mercury in her hand.”
“You put the despair in her soul.”
“Our divorce was overdue.”
“As I was born prematurely, I hear,” the son said.
Delilah nodded. The Wickedpedia entry Sansouci had found said Cleva Creighton had been pregnant before the marriage.
The Wolf Man shrugged off his furred guise and straightened into the sad, familiar human form of Larry Talbot. “I guess our timing was always off, dad.”
I held my breath, caught up in the family tragedy. Sure, they were all CinSims, so it was like watching ghosts play out some long-dead script. Yet the drama was true-to-life.
“I died young, son,” Lon Chaney said, “alone, before fifty, from gypsum in cornflakes, of all things, used to make snow on a set. I lost my voice at the end, as Cleva had, as my deaf-mute parents had before their births. A throat hemorrhage silenced me forever, seventeen years after Cleva’s mad attempt at self-destruction.”
“So why is she singing now?” Lon Jr. asked.
The two CinSims turned to me, as if I was the image of Cleva. True, I was brunette, as the printout-photo of her had been. She’d looked high-hearted smart in a top hat and a monocle, a coquette from some forgotten 1911 night club routine. We hardly resembled each other, but to the CinSims’ eyes, we were the eternal woman, heroine, victim, mother, child, lover, supporter, opponent.
“She wanted to see what you had become,” I told the Wolf Man. “And—”I turned to the Phantom. “—she wanted Creighton to hear what she had been.”
“Despite her ruined life,” the Wolf Man told his father, “she lived to a riper old age than either of us, although she’s mostly forgotten. Why would she haunt us?”
“Remember,” I said. “You’d never heard her sing as a mature man, with any real appreciation for her gift as more than a lullaby. Now you have.”
The Wolf Man nodded. “The pack sings. It’s part of our heritage.”
“Are you the actor or the role?” I asked, unsure whether I spoke to Larry or Lon Jr. anymore.
I gestured at the Phantom. “This is an inspired and impassioned instructor. You both have a chance to replay all your roles over and over again, with Cleva as an invisible audience. I don’t think you’ll see or hear her again, except in your CinSim hearts.”
Nods, then frowns. The moment had passed. The men resumed their roles, utterly alien to each other except in being monsters. Phantom and Wolf Man. Larry Talbot vanished into his woodland arena, confused and vaguely aware that something was wrong. The Phantom limped back to the bowels of the theater to follow his ironic obsession of forcing a young woman to sing her soul out.
I reported to the head monster in the penthouse soon after.
“SO YOU’RE SAYING WHEN I leased Lon Chaney, I got Junior thrown in, so I got a pair of SinCims with ‘unresolved relationship’ issues?” Cicereau demanded. “What is the Immortality Mob pushing these days?”
“Leasing illusory surfaces of human beings is a dodgy business, even in these post-Millennium Revelation days,” I told him.
“And this ghost of the Chaney guys’ wife and mother decided my hotel-casino was the place to sing bloody murder about stuff that went down a hundred years ago, when she and Lon Chaney got divorced? Women! They never give up. Why me?”
“Perhaps you own daughter’s haunting created a ‘channel’ for another woman who felt a trusted male relative had taken her life, one way or another.”
“I hired a paranormal investigator, not a psychoanalyst, Street. Out, out damn Joseph Campbell! You quit the psycho babble and concentrate on being a babe and just guarantee that psycho siren is outa the Gehenna and my hearing for good.”
“Oh, she’s gone, and I will be too. once you fork over what you owe me.”
He pulled a wad from his pin-striped pants and peeled off Benjamin Franklins, snapping the hundred-dollar bills to the desktop like playing cards.
At three thousand, he paused for my reaction.
“I banished one ghost and reunited two CinSims, not to mention I had to tussle with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man, and the Phantom of the Opera.”
He resumed, slapping down hundreds until he reached five thousand. It made quite a pile.
“Tell me you don’t sing,” he asked with a beady eye on my throat.
“I don’t.”
“Fifty-two Benjamins for the whole deck of cards, covering a maintenance visit if the Chaney boys act up again. Now get outa my sight. I’ve had it up to here with dames today.”
ONCE OUT OF THE mogul’s presence, I paused in the hall to digest the ironies of the hidden drama beneath the Gehenna’s haunting high notes.
Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces and reluctant, post-mortem “Sr.” to his son Creighton’s studio rechristening as Lon Chaney, Jr., had hoped his feats of grotesque disguise proved that “the dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals and the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice.”
Lon Chaney had learned to “speak” so eloquently in silent films by growing up with deaf-mute parents, and then died speechless of throat cancer.
Cleva Creighton had sacrificed her sublime voice in her tormented fight for the right to use it.
Creighton Chaney had rejected the father who’d deprived a young boy of his mother, but fate had turned him to walk in the same career shoes.
Speaking of shoes, I left the Gehenna with a couple months’ salary, a satisfyingly ‘happy’ ending for two icons of film history, and a kicky new pair of leopard-pattern flats with full-blown roses on the toes in honor of poor, deluded but talented Cleva Creighton.
“NEED A LIFT BACK to the Inferno party?” a voice asked. Its owner fell into step with me as I strode through the din-filled Gehenna lobby.
“I’ve had enough unwanted transportation today, thanks,” I told Sansouci. “I’ll walk.”
The daylight vampire might claim to feel no regrets for his centuries of survival on the lifeblood of other people, but I guessed he had more in common with tormented Larry Talbot than a mobster like Cesar Cicereau would ever perceive…or believe.
Alone, I pushed open an entry door and escaped the icy hotel-casino air-conditioning to mingle with the throngs of tourists heading like lemmings for the Strip under the hot-syrup warmth of the Nevada sun pouring down.
Something was snuffling at my new shoes.
I stopped and looked down, spotting a big black wet nose.
Quicksilver, my ever-shadowing wolfhound-wolf guard dog was grinning up at me with fangs and panting tongue on equal parade display.
“All’s well that ends swell, boy. We can head home to the Enchanted Cottage and the DVD player now. How’d you like to settle in with an Awesome Gnawsome chew stick, some jalapeño popcorn, and a couple of really prime vintage monster movies? The Wolf Man is a must, but, after that, do you go for heroic bell-ringers or demonic organ-players?”
His sharp, short bark indicated that my personal Big Bad Woof was ready to eat up anything.
>
“My whole career has been devoted to keeping people from knowing me.”—Lon Chaney
THE TRAGIC, IRONIC LAST ACTS OF THE CHANEY FAMILY
“So that there may be no misunderstanding or contest of any kind whatever, I hereby give and bequeath to Cleva Creighton Bush the sum of 1.00$ and no more.”
Last will and testament of Lon Chaney
LON CHANEY, THE “Man of a Thousand Faces,” made a silent film career of contorting his face and body to portray physical and mental monsters. The son of deaf-mute parents was a master mime whose famous physical transformations were painful and often caused lifelong side effects. He donned a fifty-pound “hump” to feel and portray the hunchback of Notre Dame. The Phantom of the Opera required wearing steel rings around his eyes.
“I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice," Lon Chaney wrote in Movie magazine. “Most of my roles since The Hunchback, such as The Phantom of the Opera, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unholy Three, etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do.”
Yet he couldn’t tolerate a wife or a son in the same performing career he followed.
“The history of Lon Chaney,” Ray Bradbury said, “is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that's grotesque, that the world will turn away from.”
That’s true of the actor off-screen. His professional jealousy dogged his personal life. The 17-year old singer he married in 1905 when he was 19, Francis Cleveland Creighton, became a singing sensation in cabarets as Cleva Creighton after their son Creighton was born in 1906 and years of poverty. Her spectacular voice was supporting the family, yet Lon continually pushed Cleva to give up her career to stay with Creighton.
Worn down and desperately frustrated, Cleva Creighton swallowed bi-chloride of mercury at L.A.’s Majestic Theater, where her husband was the stage manager, on April 30, 1913. Although it didn’t kill her, the poison ruined Cleva's singing voice and performing career. Lon had what he wanted, and the couple separated shortly afterwards, divorcing in 1915. Lon Chaney was given sole custody of his son, Creighton. In 1915, he married Hazel Hastings.
Ironically, the scandal of Cleva’s self-destructive act killed Lon’s stage aspirations, forcing him to turn to the film roles that made him famous.
During the filming of Thunder in the winter of 1929, Lon Chaney developed pneumonia. His bronchial lung cancer was exacerbated when artificial snow, made from gypsum “cornflakes,” lodged in his throat during filming and created a serious infection. Seven weeks after the release of the remake of The Unholy Three, he died of a throat hemorrhage Aug. 26, 1930. Ironically, that was his first speaking role and he did very well in it. He left most of his $550,000 estate to his wife, Hazel, who was interred by him on her death in 1933. The will specifically excluded the remarried Cleva in strong terms, and Creighton and a brother and a sister had “some provision” under it. Newspapers of the day noted the strong exclusion of Cleva.
It wasn’t until his father was dead and he was almost thirty that Creighton could pursue the acting career he craved. His father, adamantly against his acting, insisted he become a plumber. Creighton had many menial jobs in his earlier life. Ironically, when he was at last free to act after his father’s death, he found producers demanding he take the name of Lon Chaney, Jr. He resisted bitterly, but finally agreed.
His ambition was to outdo his famous father, and he almost did it. Lon Chaney Jr. gave a hailed performance as Lennie in Of Mice and Men, and was the only actor to play Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man. Yet the golden age of horror films was passing. He felt he never managed to best his father’s career, despite immortality as the Wolf Man. A heavy smoker and drinker, he battled alcoholism and throat cancer before dying of heart failure in 1973. Ironically, his voice was so broken by his addictions that it was reported to be an unrecognizable croak during his last role. He asked that his body be given to science. Still more ironically, after death Lon Chaney Jr. has finally become more iconic and remembered than his father.
Cleva Creighton died of a stroke Nov. 21, 1967, living long enough to see her son’s career wax and wane.
Lon Chaney Jr. and Filmography
Lon Chaney Filmography
THE FOURTH TALE
INTRODUCTION
Sometimes Delilah’s cases involve just plain human clients…mostly. Even then, as in this never-before published story, the outcome can be deadly.
WHEN YOUR NAME IS Delilah Street and you’re a PI, some people have certain expectations.
They think of Della Street, right-hand woman to a Golden Age mystery attorney-sleuth who made it big on black-and-white TV.
The assumption is that you can solve a crime with the ease of Perry Mason making a murderer confess from the witness chair in a film courtroom.
When you also work in Las Vegas, a place known for being populated with legendary mobsters, bloodsuckers and pleasure-addicted zombies since its inception, you expect to get your manicure dirty. It’s just that nowadays the bloodsuckers and zombies are literal.
“Nowadays” is after the Millennium Revelation. Instead of frozen computers or the Apocalypse, the world opened its eyes on 2001 to discover legendary supernatural beings had come out of the closet of myth and superstition. Little by little, news reports revealed they were real. Vampires and zombies and werewolf mobsters, oh my.
Naturally, Las Vegas went whole hog in exploiting the new paranormal entertainment possibilities. The most spectacular are the Cinema Simulacrums, CinSims for short. Although CinSims are a major Las Vegas attraction now, not everyone has been to Vegas lately. A shadowy corporation known as the Immortality Mob used some cutting-edge scientific mojo on “canvases” of freshly raised zombies illegally trucked in from Mexico that are overlaid with Silver Screen characters. The process is so costly the resulting CinSims are usually not “owned”, but leased as 3-D virtual personalities to the Vegas strip hotels and casinos.
That still smells like indenture to me.
By the way, the “PI” after my name is for Paranormal Investigator, not Private Investigator. Nevertheless, my new office would make Sam Spade proud.
In fact, it is his office, down to the half-glass door with my name on it and the floozy secretary in the outer office, who is a CinSim of Sam’s film secretary, Effie. What a name! I can’t imagine what it’s short for.
Responding to that thought, my silver familiar has morphed from a heavy cuff bracelet into a sleek wrist computer. Yes, I’m possessed by a lock of hair from a major Vegas supernatural that attached itself to me as a sterling silver shapeshifter. Jewelers can’t get it off with an acetylene torch or diamond-edge saw. When I’m in danger, it’ll change into weapons I can wield, but it can be annoyingly obtrusive at times.
At the moment, the familiar is flashing an LED word and definition, “Euphemia.” A Greek origin name for “well-spoken.” I can’t speak to that, because I’ve never seen Effie without a wad of Juicy Fruit gum in her mouth.
And I can’t describe Effie as an unnatural blonde because Cinema Simulacrums only come the way they unreeled in the original Silver Screen films in which they appeared: black and white and shades of gray.
Come to think, that color scheme is pretty appropriate for a neo-noir detective’s office.
Sam Spade’s Maltese Falcon office is the perk I get for living on the estate of Hector Nightwine. Hector produces the international CSI forensic TV show franchise (from CSI Bismarck (North Dakota, mind you) to CSI Brunei. You can bet Hector is richer than Devil’s food chocolate cake with a cherry glaze on top.
I’m a living-color modern girl, by the way, although I get cheap lodgings in a mockup of a forties film cottage on Hector’s ultra-secure estate. I’d merely mentioned needing to find an office somewhere else, s
ince the “Enchanted Cottage” on Sunset Road wasn’t an address that instilled confidence in even a paranormal investigator.
Before I knew it, the estate carriage house had been redone in all things Sam Spade, except for the CinSim himself. That entity is leased to the Inferno Hotel and attached to a boutique key club in one of the Nine Circles of Hell tourist traps below the hotel’s main casino.
Effie actually had more scruples than Spade himself, if you read the story rather than rely on the film. I’m happy to have her, so I perked up when she knocked on the inner door and flounced in.
“First customer, but he’s kinda creepy,” she said.
If the prospective client is a tourist, I’m sure he’d find Effie “kinda creepy,” too
Anyway, Effie ushered in an imposing male figure in a monkey suit—genuine white tie and tails—who stopped in front of my desk.
“Godfrey,” I greeted Nightwine’s butler. “Sit down.”
“That doesn’t seem right, Miss Street,” he answered formally.
Godfrey is quite an important fellow in the CinSim roster. He originated in a nineteen-thirties screwball comedy classic called My Man Godfrey and had been portrayed by William Powell.
That is the same urbane actor in Boston Blackie pencil-thin mustache who’d played that other immortal Dashiell Hammett private detective, Nick Charles, man-about-town and martini emporiums.
Also, Godfrey was a personal friend of mine. Most people treated CinSims like coat trees and curiosities. I didn’t, and had gained a lot of secret allies and snitches-about-town.
“What can I do for you, Godfrey?”
“My...er, cousin, Nick Charles, requires help at the Inferno Bar. He’s spotted a dandy case in the making but, of course, can’t do any legwork himself.”
“I’ll head right over,” I said, wanting out of my vintage digs. Sam Spade’s office furnishings were depressingly noir. I was craving straight bourbon already.
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