Because of his unique physical features, roles had to be created especially for Hatton. Fortunately for him, this was rarely a hindrance in finding work: when a certain type of director or producer got a look at Hatton’s Easter Island profile, he could usually find a way of incorporating it into the plot of his film. This meant mostly forgettable roles that required Hatton to do little more than stand in one spot while other actors reacted to his presence. More statue than statuesque, his role as runner-up ugliest man in Hunchback was repeated in all of its possible iterations, and then those iterations were repeated again.
With World War II and the departure of popular celluloid bullies to the front, Hatton’s repertoire at last began to expand, encompassing a handful of toughs and heavies, but with the steady progress of his disease, he found that even these one-dimensional roles challenged his abilities. He told a reporter on the set of The Brute Man:
Look, it’s not like I don’t know how to act. I know how to act. But this thing I got makes it tough for me. It makes it so I can’t always do what I want to do, not even with my own body. I mean, I hear the lines inside perfect, but I can’t always say them that way. I can see how the character ought to look, but I can’t always make the right face. So I end up doing takes [unintelligible]. I been thrown off three pictures now because the director couldn’t get a good take out of this mug [unintelligible]. And there ain’t nothing I can do about it, either.
He played a leper, a sailor, and a vigilante. He even finally got his chance to play the hunchback, in a film called Sleepy Lagoon. But Hatton could not be satisfied with a career even Boris Karloff scoffed at. He flew to New York between roles to study the Method at the Group Theatre and took classes in Los Angeles with Stella Adler and Robert Lewis.
With 1944, Hatton’s fortunes briefly lifted: he appeared as The Creeper in a Sherlock Holmes picture, The Pearl of Death, leading to a string of roles as The Creeper—or thinly-veiled imitations of that character—in House of Horror and The Spider Woman Strikes Back, leading up to 1946’s The Brute Man, the last film he would complete before his heart attack. With this run of success, he finally felt confident pitching his idea for a starring vehicle, a movie in which the things that had typecast him would help him to break out of type, where the drawbacks of his illness would actually aid him in his role. He would play John Merrick, the Elephant Man of Frederick Treves’s 1926 memoir, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences.
Tedious Descriptions of Architecture
On the set of that 1939 production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hatton could hardly have been blind to harried set designer Darrell Silvera still hurriedly assembling his Palace of Justice even after rehearsal and blocking had begun. Silvera was referring to a model of the Palace made out of stiff cardboard, a detailed model that had been stolen from Dame Madge Kendal by John Barrymore and then sold to an unsuspecting David O. Selznick, who bought the model for his as-yet unborn daughter. When Selznick, on the set of A Bill of Divorcement (1932), heard that his wife, Irene Mayer Selznick, had given birth to a boy, he ordered the “doll-house” destroyed. “What the hell do I care about elephants? Are we doing a circus picture here? No boy of mine is going to play with any goddamn dolls,” Selznick is reported to have said to Barrymore, “and where the hell do you get off anyway, you prick? You should have told me it was stolen. I wouldn’t have paid you so much for the goddamn thing.” The model was rescued from the fire by the assistant set designer Selznick had ordered to burn it, Darrell Silvera.
That Selznick, and thus Silvera, knew of Merrick at all could only have been the work of Barrymore—the publication of Treves’s book was only a very minor event in England and was quickly forgotten outside of the medical field even there. It had not made its way across the Atlantic to America. Apart from Treves’s tale, Merrick’s skeleton, and the casts at the London Hospital, a few scattered photographs were all that remained of the infamous Elephant Man. Barrymore was probably told of the model’s provenance by Dame Madge herself, though it seems unlikely, given his appendant actions, that he took in her story’s significance. Dame Madge treasured a similar model of St. Phillip’s Cathedral that Merrick had made for her; the Palace of Justice, she wrote after its theft “held, for me, memories of a rather more melancholy nature,” because, she claimed, it wasn’t even properly hers. She was holding onto the model for another woman, a woman who had never known it was intended for her and who had died or disappeared before Dame Madge could deliver it. Dame Madge’s “memories” referred equally to the circumstances under which Merrick is supposed to have completed it, and those which brought it into her possession.
Though he had been born in Leicester and traveled to London and to Dover, Merrick had been limited in his travels to and from the capital to what he could glimpse through the slit in his mask from grimy coach and coal-blacked train windows. Bewitched by the quotidian, Merrick looked upon the English countryside as scarcely less exotic than the surface of the moon. He had never once walked across a field, smelled freshly clipped grass, or seen a spring in flood. Living in cramped and squalid quarters in industrial backwaters for most of his life, he had scarcely seen a flower in bloom or even a bird in flight. Treves therefore arranged for Merrick to stay a fortnight on the country estate of a society lady of his acquaintance, Lady Knightley. It had been relatively easy to secure accommodations, as, after the Princess of Wales had visited his tiny rooms at the London Hospital, Merrick had enjoyed some degree of fame among the British upper classes. A railcar was reserved for his private use, through the generosity of the British railways, and they even arranged to shunt the car off at a siding at London and then again at his destination in Northamptonshire, so that Merrick would not have to endure the mobs of hysterical gawkers at the depots. A traveling disguise of cape, hood, and his beloved silver-tipped walking stick gave Merrick a raffish, almost gallant air. It was the closest he would come to traveling “as other people do,” (his most mournful refrain, if Treves is to be believed) and he exulted in all of it.
Unfortunately, upon opening the gates of her estate, Fawsley Park, to this odd figure, Lady Knightley fainted dead away, leaving Merrick without a place to lay his head. Treves, resourceful to the last, arranged for Merrick to spend his vacation at the house of the game warden on the estate, a much stouter man than his mistress as it turned out. And so Merrick merrily did, enraptured by the novelty of even this, most humble of country accommodations.
Lady Knightley, ashamed that she had committed such a grave faux-pas in fainting at the sight of her own honored guest, sought to save face and correct her misstep; she made Merrick the present of a light and diverting entertainment from her own library. She had been told by Treves that what Merrick liked above all else was to read, particularly romances (even more particularly, those in which the hero or heroine, brought low through circumstance, is revealed to have high-born blood), and she found no better book for the recipe than Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That it was, in all likelihood, exactly the reverse of what Merrick usually sought in reading—that is, an escape from his terrible condition—we must charitably conclude, probably did not occur to her. But at the moment of delivery, some glimmer of Merrick’s dignity impressed itself upon her, and she hesitated. She very nearly asked for it back, but thought that would have been just as cruel, and in the end, embarrassed, fainted dead away yet again. Merrick, imbued with a mischievous and contrarian spirit, read the thus intoxicatingly taboo book with relish, spending his days wandering the Midlands hillocks and his nights sounding the cobblestones of late-medieval Paris. A fortnight earlier, setting out from the Hospital, he could scarcely have envisioned such a perfect holiday.
Merrick was most enchanted by Hugo’s luxurious descriptions of architecture and urban planning in the City of Lights. Though Merrick had been to the Continent—on the curtailed leg of a tour of Belgium and the Netherlands—he had not seen Paris. Sightseeing was surmounted only perhaps by flying on Merrick’s list of improbabilitie
s; the best he could manage even in London was a quick passage from one dark shadow to the next, avoiding the goggling eyes of his ever-present oglers. The city was to him a portable and inescapable stage from which he could only see as far as the footlights. To be part of the crowd, to see the boulevards and avenues like any other burgher or boulevardier, to fly to the top of the city and see the whole of Paris from the bell-tower of Notre Dame—it was not precisely a dream, but it was certainly a long way from his life.
With tears seeping from the pendulous flap of his permanently heavy-lidded right eye, Merrick read without pause, fearing his arrival at the station in London too soon to close the book, read there of the curious revelation of Esmeralda’s birth and her all-too-sudden death at the hands of the authorities, read of Frollo’s deserved demise and Esmeralda’s ravisher’s shameful indolence. Closing the book and stepping off at the siding, he longed only to avenge Esmeralda, to succeed where Quasimodo had failed. Never had Treves seen poor Merrick so worked up: he could only with great difficulty understand the pitifully enraged, gibbering figure arriving at the Hospital’s door. Treves advised a walk around Bedstead Square and a good night’s rest, but Merrick was far too worked up to contemplate repose.
Merrick had always entertained an innocent infatuation with one of his nurses, a Miss Green, whose Christian name has never been recorded. Because of the protuberance which gave him his nickname, a growth which pushed its way out through his mouth in the general shape of a nascent elephant’s trunk, Merrick’s speech was terribly distorted. Early on, before he had begun his residency at the London Hospital, doctors in the employment of the Leicester Union Workhouse had operated to remove the better part of it—some four inches, said to weigh nearly five pounds—in order to assure that Merrick would be able to eat and drink. But with the progress of his disease, this protuberance began to lengthen again, and in time, even Treves, his closest confidant, could only with begged repetitions and admonitions to enunciate understand Merrick when he grew excited. How much less then those who, like Miss Green, might only spend a few hours a week with him, and those short hours engaged in a workaday routine that scarcely afforded the opportunity for earnest or amorous exchanges. Merrick could not seem to get across to Miss Green that she was the Aphrodite to his Hephaestus. His encumbered tongue could not shape the words with the supple grace such delicate pleas demanded.
Perhaps, as he wrote to Dame Madge, if he could not communicate in words the fullness of his heart, he might give its measure in some other manner. The materials at hand afforded him but one opportunity: either a cardboard model or some sort of a basket (In order to better pass the time, Merrick had asked and received materials and instruction in basket-weaving from Dame Madge. And pass the time it did, as he was effectively one-handed with his right hand so deformed that he could not use it for anything but a sort of paper-weight). The basket would be a plain one, however excruciatingly wrought, unlikely to arouse anything greater than appreciation, even in one so well-acquainted with its fashioner’s handicap. The model offered the possibility at least of expression, but how to communicate through architecture his tender feelings?
Perhaps, Merrick wrote, through an allusion to the great work he had just finished reading. After all, given its presenter, how could Miss Green fail to see the significance?
A Model Made Out of Card
His first thought was to execute the Cathedral itself, with its glorious confusion of styles so minutely described by Hugo that Merrick thought he could build it straight from the text. But he could hardly pronounce such a model a triumph of love: after all, it was in the Cathedral that Quasimodo had held Esmeralda, where he had finally been explicitly given notice that his tenure as her virtue’s guard was over, ridiculed as a lover, and irrevocably spurned. This would signify too much his present plight, not the pleasant future he wanted Miss Green to envision as the key to his tribute’s lock. Instead, why not attempt the Palace of Justice, where Quasimodo, the monster, the freak, had been celebrated, had had his well-deserved day in the sun, however brief the break in the clouds? Merrick began work on it straight away, without pausing for his prescribed perambulation or even his much-needed drowse. He posted his letter to Dame Madge the following morning, detailing his projected monument and its much-hoped-for sequel.
At completion, the model could have had little enough of semblance to its original: Hugo goes into painstaking detail in his descriptions of Notre-Dame de Paris, but only gives us a snapshot, as it were, of the gallery and the forecourt of the Palace of Justice. The veracity of Merrick’s cardboard billet-doux would have been confined to its edifice, no more substantive than a Hollywood soundstage about to be struck. It was thus perfect for a cinematic set designer, but probably still too slanted for a love letter.
We cannot be certain of what transpired, but it seems likely that when, several days later, Miss Green delivered Merrick’s lunch, Merrick pointed out the completed Palace, its forecourt and face as faithful as he could make them, the rest a complete fancy of his imagination. Miss Green either acknowledged it politely and conveniently forgot it there, or else did not comprehend what it was her host was attempting to show her. Whatever Miss Green’s understanding of the situation, she left the model on the table where it had been assembled, a trophy scorned by its winner, a tribute unremarked by its muse.
What we do know is that Merrick left his food untouched on the tray Miss Green had brought it in on. It has been conjectured, by Treves among others, that Merrick then fell back to sleep, a queer operation for him at any hour, due to his physique. He had always to sleep in a sitting position, with his knees up and pressed against his forehead, because the shape and heft of his head made lying down treacherous. Treves, probably wishing to save Merrick from this last indignity, wishfully espoused the thought that Merrick had only been trying out a prone sleeping position, hoping to the last to be able to do at least something “like other people.” It was merely an accident, a pitiful tragedy.
In light of Miss Green’s snub, it seems it was most likely a willful one. Joseph Merrick, denied even in his most oblique attentions, simply gave up. He lay back and let the weight of his own head dislocate his neck, cutting off the flow of air to his lungs and smothering him. If he could not better Quasimodo in his conquests, he could at least join the dwarf in defeat and follow Esmeralda to the gallows.
Dame Madge received Merrick’s letter and the news of his passing at the same moment. In five years of correspondence and innumerable shared intimacies, she had never once set eyes on him, and the guilt she felt on that score prompted her next course of action. She decided to pay her last respects in person, and to make sure that his last, most beautiful missive had indeed found its addressee. But arriving at the hospital, she found that Miss Green wasn’t on the roster and Treves had already removed Merrick’s body for dissection. He was making casts of Merrick even as Dame Madge gained admittance to Merrick’s rooms. When Miss Green could not be located, Dame Madge did succeed in carrying off the model and arranging to have it delivered, but Miss Green’s address could never be confirmed. It appears she had been more or less temporary help, her salary paid out of a subscription fund made in Merrick’s name. With Merrick’s passing, the monies were transferred to the Hospital’s general fund, and Miss Green let go.
The model was kept on the mantle in one of the Kendals’ sitting rooms in their London home. It occupied this place of honor for many years, until it went missing after a particularly rowdy John Barrymore visited on the eve of his departure for Los Angeles and the filming of his latest picture, A Bill of Divorcement. Dame Madge was scandalized, but by the time a sober and contrite Barrymore made a return visit to London, she was seriously ill, and within a year, she had passed away.
Based on an Original Story by Darrell Silvera
Meanwhile, the model had gained new life, as we have seen, on the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Silvera had heard only what Barrymore had told Selznick years earlier, trying to save t
he cardboard Palace from immolation. “David, it’s sacrilege. Think of the horrible life that man lived. Think of the privations, the humiliations he must have endured. Now think of the shame, the permanent mark history will leave on you if you destroy it,” Barrymore is supposed to have said. “Nothing in Hollywood is permanent, you prick. Now burn the goddamn thing,” Selznick famously replied.
But with Selznick off running Selznick International, Silvera could indulge the model openly. He had constructed a tiny platform to stand in front of the model’s Palace, complete with stocks and paper dolls representing the contestants in the Pope of Fools contest, to get a sense of how much of the Palace needed to be dressed. The set Silvera and his dressers had reclaimed was Dr. Moreau’s villa from The Island of Lost Souls, filmed years earlier on a neighboring soundstage and rescued from Paramount’s trashpile. Positively heroic work had to be done to give it the look of medieval Paris: its front had to be reversed, repainted, and repurposed for the Palace’s façade. And all of it had to be done on the fly, with Berman putting the scene in the call sheets just weeks before shooting was supposed to go ahead. There would be just enough time to build exactly what was going on screen and no surplus for elaboration or ornament.
During rehearsals, Hatton was likely curious: what was this thing that Silvera kept crossing to consult? Silvera must have then told Hatton what he had learned of the Elephant Man, whatever mutated version of events Barrymore had drunkenly conveyed to Selznick in whatever distorted, mangled form it had assumed in Silvera’s memory in the seven years since he had overheard it. No doubt Silvera was spurred to remember the model’s rumored creator because of the remarkable visage in front of him. He may have even encouraged Hatton to pursue the project, begging the all-important screen credit for his role in the film’s conception.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 14