Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Thank God. Thank God. Although—”

  She smiled. “I know. You’d have forgiven me. I’m not so sure I would forgive you under the same circumstances; but it’s the differences between us that makes what we have worth fighting to keep.”

  “So we’re okay?” He was almost afraid to ask the question.

  “I have a sneaking suspicion were going to be better than that in a minute. Would you like to see the reason I took Jeff up on his invitation?”

  “Did you bring back a covered dish?”

  She laughed, pushed herself away from the van, and walked to the back, practically skipping. There she flung open the rear doors and stepped away so he could see inside.

  It was a sunny day, no smog alerts in effect, and his eyes had to adjust to the dimness. At first he thought he was staring at a propped-up corpse, no unusual cargo for the vehicle. Then he realized it was a twin of the vintage Bell & Howell projector in The Oracle, mounted on a sturdy stand.

  “Jeff bought it when an old theater in Yakima was condemned to make room for a city parking lot,” she said. “He told me he had it when I told him what you do and about the theater you’re restoring, and about how you needed two projectors to show old three-D films. None of his regular customers were interested; it was just taking up space in his basement. I offered to trade him even up for the sideboard my grandfather brought with him when he came here from Sweden. He took me up on it, sight unseen. Am I a good horse trader or what?”

  “You love that sideboard,” he said.

  “Nobody loves a piece of furniture, Val. Love is for people— and parakeets and such.”

  “You and Jeff talked about me?”

  “I talked. I think part of why he gave me such a good deal was to shut me up.”

  He started to take her in his arms. Her partner came trotting up waving a cell phone. “We need to unload. We got a dismemberment in Inglewood, maybe two.”

  “Go help them sort out the arms and legs,” Valentino said.

  “You smooth talker, you.” She kissed him hard.

  **

  “Are you sure we’re up for this party?” he asked. “Our track record in costume occasions isn’t so good.”

  “You know you never turn down an invitation to a Halloween blast. Anyway, we can’t disappoint Jason. We’ll probably be the only fossils in attendance.” Harriet came out of the bedroom of her apartment, adjusting her wig, which was as tall as Martha Simpson’s hair but jet-black, with silver lightning streaks running up the sides. Between it and her high heels, concealed beneath the hem of a long white gown cinched at the waist and padded in the shoulders, she stood nearly as tall as Valentino in his built-up boots and flat rubber headpiece, an exact replica of the one Jack Pierce had designed for Boris Karloff and the host of other actors who’d inherited the role of the Monster; Kyle Broadhead and his contacts at Universal had come through in spades. What was a steampunk party without Frankenstein’s creation and his bride?

  “You’re looking particularly hideous this evening,” he told her.

  “How sweet. When they made you they didn’t just break the mold. They left plenty of it on you.” They hooked arms.

  The roof of Valentino’s compact was too low to accommodate her skyscraper hair, so she’d borrowed the coroner’s van, which he thought a poetic touch.

  On the way to the buzz-saw blade factory, Harriet watched a pair of youngsters dressed as Harry Potter and Lady Gaga carrying bright paper sacks along the sidewalk. “I can’t understand why he asked us to come so early. The trick-or-treaters are barely out.”

  “Apparently it’s a surprise. He said it was something only you and I would fully appreciate.”

  “I hope it’s not some sort of prank.” She turned the corner.

  “This isn’t the way I usually go. Are you sure you’re not lost?”

  “Shortcut. Every few months a homeless person takes a flyer off a roof or gets crushed in a Dumpster or comes out on the losing end of a fight with boxcutters in that neighborhood. I’m pretty sure we carried a frozen carcass out of that address a couple of winters back. The trick is not to break anything off on the way through the door.”

  “I’ll make you a deal: Cut the CSI shop talk for one night and I’ll try to throttle back on movie trivia.”

  “Bet you crack first.”

  “Our usual wager?”

  “Yep.”

  “Either way I win.”

  Jason Stickley was pacing back and forth in front of the building when they pulled up, looking like the Mad Hatter in his high hat and flapping coattails. His nervous energy always reminded Valentino of someone, possibly himself.

  “Thanks for coming,” said the intern when they stepped out. “I was afraid some of the others might trickle in ahead of you and get in the way. Wow!” He was staring at Harriet. “No offense, Mr. Valentino; you look great. But—wow!”

  She beamed. “You’re too kind. Just sing out when I get too close to a power line.”

  Jason scampered up the steps ahead of them (Valentino providing support as Harriet lifted her skirts to climb them in her spikes) and turned one of his keys in the lock. It made a grating noise and he tugged open the door on shrieking hinges.

  “How’d you manage that?” Valentino asked.

  “I replaced the brass fittings with rusty iron ones I found in a bin in a junk shop. Then the caretaker came along and oiled them and I had to do it all over again.” He waved them in ahead of him.

  A great deal had been done with the room since Valentino had visited it with Broadhead and Fanta. Someone with an expert knowledge of anatomy and metallurgy (a collaboration?) had welded full-size human skeletons of steel and aluminum and set them about the room in various poses and attitudes, and naked lightbulbs that might have come directly from Thomas Edison’s workshop hung from cords of irregular length, dazzling the eye and sparkling off the carpet of metal shavings on the floor. An old-fashioned cast-iron stove served as a refreshment table, with a coal-scuttle centerpiece filled with bloodred punch and surrounded by upended lugnuts the size of fists, salvaged from the great wheel of some obsolete steam-powered device to perform sociable duty as cups. Everywhere, candles blazed in silver and pewter holders, and in honor of the evening the papier-mâché horses hitched to the forklift truck wore gilded masks decorated with ostrich plumes.

  However, Valentino’s eye was drawn past all these things to a number of infernal machines set up at intervals around the walls, as familiar to his memory as they were unknown to his personal experience: Roentgen rays, Tesla coils, gadgets whose names he didn’t know, studded with knobs and dials and row upon row of switches, feral and scientific at the same time, poised to crackle and hum and glow and hurl sparks willy-nilly, all for the dramatic purpose of directing current through an inanimate humanoid thing assembled from grisly spare parts found in crypts and mortuaries and suspended from gallowses and bringing life to something that had never lived. He’d witnessed the scene hundreds of times, beginning with a fuzzy image on a worn-out picture tube, and it had never failed to excite him.

  “They’re all working replicas of the equipment Kenneth Strickfadden designed for all the Frankenstein films,” Jason said, his voice quivering with emotion. “Wilde Thing—you met him the other night, his real name’s Kevin—he built it all from scratch. He’s working his way to a physics degree as an electrician. I was sure you’d appreciate it.”

  Harriet clutched Valentino’s arm tight. He scarcely noticed.

  “Does it work?”

  “Does it work!” Jason swept away the cloth covering a huge knife-switch with a varnished wooden handle attached to an electrical box on the wall. “Would you care to do the honors?”

  “Careful, Val.” But Harriet let go of him, patting his arm on the way.

  Valentino grasped the switch and threw it.

  **

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank my wife, author Deborah M
organ, for Dumpster-diving the Internet for updated information on my outdated sources (any errors are mine), and for suggesting the perfect title for this book. I’m also extremely grateful to her for allowing me to borrow Jeff Talbot and his wife, Sheila, from Deborah’s Antiques Lovers mystery series, published by Berkley Books and available on audio from Books in Motion.

  In addition, I wish to credit the late great Forrest J. Ackerman, founder and publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and all the personnel behind TV’s Shocker Theater for conducting Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney, Jr., into my childhood home. (Yes, that was me watching Frankenstein, sitting up in bed with Pepi, my Chihuahua-terrier, curled up safe and warm in my lap.)

  **

  CLOSING CREDITS

  A good cast is worth repeating.

  —Universal Pictures, 1930s

  The following sources were crucial in the writing of Alive!:

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Biographies

  Bojarski, Richard, and Kenneth Beale. The Films of Boris Karloff. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1974.

  Citadel, the gold standard for filmographies subdivided by individual stars and directors, continues its reputation with this lively biography of Hollywood’s greatest bogeyman (and an actor whose skills are greatly underrated [1945’s The Body Snatcher makes a sterling case for the defense]) and meticulous chronicle of his appearances on stage and television, as well as on the big screen. The man made 137 films—fifty-four of them before Frankenstein made his name a creepy household word—from 1919 through 1971 (two years after his death!), but as he noted himself, he will always be known as the tragic, inarticulate, misunderstood creation of reckless science and black magic whose flattened head and shambling, stiff-legged walk is familiar to every culture on earth.

  Bojarski, Richard. The Films of Bela Lugosi. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1980.

  Lugosi—the only authentic Transylvanian ever to play Count Dracula on screen, and the man whose interpretation will always be associated with the role—suffered through a career that was in every way the mirror image of Karloff’s. The same typecasting that assured his British rival a steady income and a comfortable old age kept him in poverty and helped to bring on the drug addiction that ruined his health and shortened his life. This fine study of his contribution to stage and screen justifiably tips the balance away from humiliation (Glen or Glenda?, et al) toward the sporadic but memorable highlights (thousands of live theatrical performances as Dracula under his own direction, to rave reviews before standing-room-only audiences, two Oscar-worthy turns as Ygor, twisted in mind as well as body, but strangely sympathetic, and a brief but resounding role in Ninotchka, in which he managed to steal the scene from Garbo, in a rare foray into romantic comedy). This is a tragic but compellingly readable cautionary tale for anyone who considers himself too successful to fail.

  Curtis, James. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998.

  The Frankenstein series is rife with genius gone horribly wrong. Whale, the brilliant director of Journey’s End on stage, the original Showboat on screen, and the first two talkies in the unstoppable Mary Shelley franchise, was flamboyantly gay at a time when homosexuality was still regarded as “the love of which we dare not speak” (Oscar Wilde), but it was his personal arrogance, insupportable by a string of box-office disasters, that led to his undoing in Hollywood. His 1957 death by apparent suicide in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades home, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, occupy much of Gods and Monsters (1998; see under Tributes), a film based on Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein. Bram’s research and Curtis’s appear to be in close agreement.

  Gifford, Dennis. Karloff: The Man, the Monster, the Movies. New York: Curtis Books, 1973.

  This was the first Karloff biography to appear after his death, and it holds up remarkably well in a climate that generally produces gushy panegyrics in the afterglow of a life recently vacated, then character-assassinating “tell-alls” by hatchet-throwers freed from the restrictions of civil suits. Karloff’s East Indian ancestry is the only revelation that might have damaged his career in a time of relative intolerance, but since no shame attaches to it now, its absence from Gifford’s book is hardly a detraction. Much of it (as its title reflects) is filmography, but the background and personality of its subject comes through, and the details of the Frankenstein films—in particular makeup wizard Jack Pierce’s deeply researched and painstaking efforts to “create” the Monster we know and love (Whale’s claim to the design is specious)—were of inestimable value to Alive!

  **

  2. Original Shooting Scripts

  Riley, Philip J., ed. (Although Riley claimed only “Production Background” credit for Dracula, his acknowledgment as editor of all the Frankenstein titles in the series justifies extending this liberty across the board. Gregory William Mank, author of It’s Alive!, covered background in all the Frankenstein books.) Absecon, NJ: Magiclmage Film Books.

  This series, lusciously bound in 8½-by-11-inch glossy paper with reproductions of the original posters on the covers, includes the original shooting scripts of classic Universal horror films presented in facsimile (typescripts with contemporary annotations in hand), copious production histories, photos taken on and off the sets, publicity material, personal memoirs by surviving principals, and/or essays by noted film scholars. They represent unique primary sources, with perspectives on the evolution from page to screen. (The differences are even more illuminating than the similarities.)

  Each title is presented in chronological order of release to theaters.

  Dracula. (1931) Preface by Carla Laemmle, “Uncle Carl’s” niece and Carl, Jr.’s cousin. Published 1990.

  Frankenstein. (1931) Foreword by Forrest J. Ackerman, legendary publisher of the seminal Famous Monsters of Filmland (for more on which see Film Studies). Published 1989.

  The Bride of Frankenstein. (1935) Introduction by Valerie Hobson, who inherited the role of Elizabeth from Mae Clarke in the first film. (As such, she is the actual bride of the title; Elsa Lanchester, in addition to playing Mary Shelley in the prologue, is merely the romantic interest of Frankenstein’s nameless Monster.) Published 1989.

  The Son of Frankenstein (50th Anniversary Edition). (1939) Oddly, this golden commemorative contains no personal material or scholarly retrospective, although Mank’s meticulous production history alone is worth the cover price. Published 1989.

  The Ghost of Frankenstein. (1942) Introduction by Ralph Bellamy, who took time out early in an incredibly long career made up of hundreds of character parts to play the romantic lead. Published 1989.

  Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. (1943) Foreword by Curt Siodmak, who wrote the screenplay, scripted the original Wolf Man (1941), and penned the deathless line “Even a man who is pure in heart . . .” Published 1990.

  House of Frankenstein. (1944) Interview with Elena Verdugo, introduction by Peter Coe, both of whom appeared prominently in the film. Published 1991.

  House of Dracula. (1945) Introduced by John Carradine, who played Dracula this time around, but didn’t live to see his account in bookstores. Published 1993.

  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. (1948) Foreword by Bud Abbott, Jr., Vickie Abbott Wheeler, Chris Costello, and Paddy Costello Humphreys. Published 1990.

  **

  3. Film Studies

  Ackerman, Forrest J. Famous Monsters of Filmland. Philadelphia: Warren Publishing Co.

  From the time most baby boomers were toddlers until his death in his nineties in 2008, “Forrie” introduced classic (and not-so-classic) horror, fantasy, and science fiction films to a new generation through his magazine. (He coined the term “sci-fi.”) It was noted for its thousands of black-and-white stills, interviews with surviving performers, outrageous puns, and exquisitely rendered cover paintings of iconic monsters from Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera to Chucky. In private life he was
an omnivorous collector of priceless fantasy memorabilia and a generous contributor to the cause of film restoration and preservation. My own affinity for lost Hollywood began with FMOF, and although the character of J. Arthur Greenwood was inspired by Ackerman, I want to make it clear that the Horrorwood mogul’s venality was an invention (although I flatter myself that he’d forgive me, given his pro-monster sensibilities).

  Anobile, Richard J. James Whale’s Frankenstein. New York: Universe Books, 1974.