Despite these factors, Victoria - like the audience - perseveres. The first few months of storyline feature mysterious attacks on her life, a common staple of the genre. Burke Devlin, an enigmatic businessman who has a grudge against the Collins family, fulfills the role of the brooding hero.
It would be polite to say these episodes were not up to the standards of pace and intrigue later set on Dark Shadows. They were quite typical of the soap operas of the time: a half-hour of slow-moving plots filled with sad and somewhat dreary characters. Even Dan Curtis admits, somewhat more bluntly, “We were really bombing, so I figured, to hell with it. If I’m going to fail, I’ll at least have a good time. I went wild, and tossed in a ghost.” Collinwood was officially haunted.
What began as a slightly different, but quite ordinary soap opera in terms of production was soon to become a special- effects juggling act, employing techniques that had never been attempted on daytime television, let alone on live TV. Dark Shadows was shot live-on-tape. What happened on that cramped set would be broadcast to America on a national network hook-up. This included stage hands stumbling inexplicably on-camera, flies zooming around an actor’s face, teetering and falling scenery, and actors “going up” on their lines. When forgetting their lines, the actors relied on the Teleprompter, a device attached to the camera, with a rolling printout of the day’s dialogue.
The first two full-blown ghosts were simply thrown in for effect, but one of them would eventually become an important character. This character was first seen in a portrait above the mantel in the Old House, Collinwood’s adjacent building and home of the founders of Collinwood, which would also eventually play a most crucial part in the plot. The painting was of a young dark-haired widow named Josette Collins. We knew nothing more about her than her name, what she had looked like, and that she had died a suicide sometime in the 18th century.
In Episode 70, the portrait simply “came to life” and spoke to young David Collins, who often escaped the “oppression” at Collinwood by exploring the dusty buildings of his ancestral home.
This “coming to life” involved Chromakey, a very difficult special effects process that involved the labors of several technicians and more than a little rehearsal. An actor or actress was placed in front of a plain blue screen (which wouldn’t be visible on camera) and the footage was superimposed on the scene. With Chromakey Dark Shadows’ production staff could do the impossible, materializing ghosts from paintings and, as once happened, out of a brick wall.
The actress who brought Josette’s portrait to life, Kathryn Leigh Scott, remembers the appearance of their second spirit, the ghost of Bill Malloy (Frank Schofield): “It happened with the reappearance of a sea captain who had already been killed off. When he returned one afternoon, dripping seaweed, and the audience saw him alone on the set, the series became a true ghost story.”
Victoria, locked in Collinwood’s closed-off wing as a result of one of David’s favorite pranks, witnesses Malloy’s appearance. While his dark figure is only fleeting, the seaweed left on the floor in his wake proves to the audience that this wasn’t just a shadow or somebody’s imagination. The days of flirting with red-herring phantoms were now past. Or as director Lela Swift pointed out to Curtis, “We’ve crossed the line with this, you know. Do you really want to do this?”
“When the ghosts happened, the ratings began to go up,” Costello recalls. “We tried a few more eccentric phenomena, getting bolder and bolder.”
Soon Collinwood seemed to have a greater population of the undead that the living. Mad caretaker Matthew Morgan (Thayer David), about to do in Victoria with an ax, is frightened to death by a plethora of ghosts including those of Bill Malloy, Josette Collins and the Widows.
To improve ratings even further, Curtis decided to borrow a staple from other daytime serials: the return of a character supposedly dead. A “return from the dead” was, on most soaps, explained by human error—a body “burned beyond recognition” and mistakenly identified was a frequent dodge.
David’s mother Laura was scheduled for a similar return to fight for custody of her son. It seemed a solid storyline, one likely to catch the interest of the audience. The clincher, though, was the day an imaginative member of the company suggested, “Hey, suppose David’s mother really WAS dead!”
“What was fun about that was all this was new to daytime TV,” writer Ron Sproat observed. “The reason I loved the Laura story at the beginning is that it was one of the first times we really used ghosts all over the place. Vicki could get signals from the ’good ghost of Collinwood’ - that was Josette. She’d direct Vicki to the crypts, books would flip open by themselves, all this stuff. It was so unlike anything daytime TV had done.”
Veteran television actress Diana Millay was cast in the role of Laura Murdoch Collins who had arrived in Collinwood to challenge Roger Collins’ custody of their son David. She ostensibly had died in a fire in Phoenix, Arizona. Yet here she was, now wanting David for herself. But she would not be taking the boy away to West Palm Beach or Toledo, as might have happened in Days of Our Lives or General Hospital. Laura would be secretly taking little David off to his death by fire, as she had done with her children every hundred years or so.
You see, Laura Murdoch Collins was a phoenix...
The plot began offering seances and grave-openings, as Dark Shadows leaned more and more toward the supernatural. With the aid of Dr Peter Guthrie (John Lasell), an expert in psychic phenomena, and the ghost of Josette, Victoria is eventually able to save David from the clutches of his unearthly mother. Laura vanishes in a thunder of fire and ash - and Collinwood returns to “normal.”
Despite a considerable improvement in its ratings, Dark Shadows was still an enfeebled contender in the daytime roster. ABC executives had never given it much chance. It was “too different.” The executives at ABC issued an ultimatum: “Bring up the ratings in 26 weeks or you are finished.”
The supernatural elements had already strengthened the ratings, and because Curtis had always had a special place in his heart for vampires, he decided to create the biggest, meanest vampire in the history of vampires. He would be Dark Shadows’ arch-villain, the essence of All-Evil. And in thirteen weeks, he would die (like the phoenix Laura Collins) in a purifying pyre of flame, a stake through his heart and a sprig of garlic in his mouth. If it had to go, Dark Shadows would go with a bang.
The cousin from England: The Arrival of Barnabas Collins
By the spring of ’67, Curtis had decided that if his gamble on a soap opera had a future, it had to “go all the way with the supernatural stuff.” Others on the staff of Dark Shadows were not so certain. “At that time I had no idea that the vampire would be the element that saved us,” says Costello. “And I was very cautious about approaching it.”
The introduction of the vampire was, quite simply, the desperate measure called for by desperate times. By 1967, Dark Shadows had weathered more than seven months of traumatic changes, with major, innovative and risky alterations, plus stiff competition from the other networks. ABC was in third place, which meant that anemic performance from any of its shows could be tolerated for just so long. The vampire might only have to serve for a few weeks, until ratings reached a level that would keep the series afloat. And even if the response was negative it was better to go down in flames than simply to run out of gas. There was little honor in retreat.
Curtis was visiting in Europe during this time, so casting fell to the capable hands of Robert Costello. He decided that the vampire was to be set free from his coffin by a ne’er-do-well, Willie Loomis.
This character had been established earlier as a small-time drifter, always on the lookout for the main chance, who had attached himself to Jason McGuire. Jason (played by Dennis Patrick), an old friend of Paul Stoddard had come to Collinwood to blackmail Elizabeth Stoddard, who believed that she had murdered her husband eighteen years earlier. The storyline tied up a number of loose ends and provided the explanation of why Elizabet
h had been a recluse ever since. Elizabeth would discover that she had not killed her husband - she had, in fact, only stunned him. The “body” that McGuire had buried in the basement (ostensibly to protect Elizabeth) was nothing more than a trunk full of old clothing.
Willie Loomis was first portrayed by James Hall; by the time the character became more prominent, John Karlen had assumed the role.
John Karlen was born John Adam Francis Karlewicz in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in a Sicilian neighborhood, the infamous Red Hook district, what Karlen termed “the roughest...the only place rougher is East Los Angeles.” His father, born in Puznine, Poland, worked as a house painter to feed his family. But the elder Karlewicz also spoke seven languages and, according to John Karlen, “played the most beautiful violin I have ever heard.” Karlen also remembers his father as “stern and gentle, torn between the old world and our neighborhood. Our neighborhood was wonderful, but it was dangerous, too.” In the Red Hook, young Karlen’s friends were what John termed “great guys, but petty thieves, just like I was at the time.”
At a young age, Karlen escaped to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, his harsh roots defining his talent. “I’d like to rewrite all the acting books,” he would say several years after Dark Shadows. “All those books are baloney. If a part fits into your range, you can play it. Everything else is hogwash. You don’t play Macbeth for two-and-a-half hours a day and play it well unless you’re an actor.”
Although hardly Macbeth, the role of Willie Loomis was one of the most complex of all Dark Shadows characters.
Willie had become fascinated by the portrait of Barnabas Collins - and more so by the legends he had heard about secret caches of a fabulous fortune in jewels, supposedly buried in the Collins mausoleum. On a midnight expedition to the family crypt, he finds a promising sarcophagus. Attempting to open it, he accidentally trips a secret door to another vault, and it slowly opens to reveal a hidden room. Inside the room is a chained coffin.
Willie is elated. A chained coffin must hold something valuable. The jewels? With the tools he has brought along, he manages to wrench the lid open.
A hand flies up to Loomis’ throat, clutching tight in a death grip as Willie moans weakly.
“When we shot that scene, we all howled with delight,” Robert Costello recalls. “We enjoyed doing the show. But even though we laughed at it, we were deadly serious about doing it. It was a very good company. We were doing something that had never been done before, and we were welded together by the oddness of the show. Anyhow, that was the way the vampire Barnabas was born.
“I got the name Barnabas off a tombstone in Flushing, New York, from an old Dutch graveyard that dated back to the 18th century. I was looking through documents listing the graves and there was Barnabas Smith or something. Barnabas! If you think naming a baby or a dog is something, try naming a vampire some time!”
The second week of April, 1967, there was a new portrait hanging in Collinwood’s foyer. It would bear the grim countenance of the family’s supposed ancestor, Barnabas Collins.
This head-and-shoulders portrait would become recognizable immediately to a generation of television fans. But until the last few days before the episode in which it was to first appear was taped, the portrait had only a body, one onyx-ringed hand grasping a wolf’s head cane. Even the distinctive Barnabas hairstyle was in place. The one thing the portrait of Barnabas was missing was a face.
Robert Costello was the stand-in for Barnabas while the portrait was painted. “I got all gussied up in this suit we found, with the badges [ribbons on the lapel] and the ring, a very distinctive but deceptively plain onyx stone, worn on the portrait’s index finger. I got the idea for the wolf’s head cane, too. And so I posed for the picture.”
Barnabas’ signature hairstyle evolved from Robert Costello’s receding hairline. What hair he had, he pulled across his forehead into distinctive, spiked bangs. The picture having been taken, it was given to a scenic artist who “painted everything but the face. So now we have this portrait hanging around with no face.”
The search for a vampire’s face was as difficult as the search for Victoria Winters. The search for the actor to play Barnabas Collins was on.
Jonathan Frid had not only attended England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but also held an MFA in drama from Yale. A native of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Frid had often played Shakespeare’s villains. “I portrayed so many conspirators in Shakespeare’s historical plays,” he says, “that even today my only real political allegiance is to the House of York.”
In the spring of 1967, Frid had just finished a national tour of Hostile Witness with actor Ray Milland. He was looking forward to a move to California, hoping to use his MFA from Yale in the comparatively respectable, sane, and secure position of drama professor. Just as Frid was about to leave New York for California, his telephone rang.
“I left my bags in the hall and ran in to answer it,” Frid remembers. “It was my agent, offering the part of a vampire on a soap opera called Dark Shadows. He persuaded me to audition by pointing out that the job would last only a few weeks and would net me some extra money to go to the Coast with.”
Frid remembers his attitude during the casting call as indifference rather than nervousness or apprehension. He was, after all, almost on his way to a new career, and whether he got the job or not mattered little. In fact, Frid was quite secure in the belief that he would not get the role. He recalls thinking that it was all a waste of his time. “I think that because I was in that frame of mind,” Jonathan adds, “I ended up getting the job.”
The events of the next few weeks are remembered differently by different sources. One version is that Curtis (still in Europe) had been sent photos of three contending actors, one of them Jonathan Frid. Curtis was to send back the picture of the actor he wanted. He sent back Frid’s photo. But when Curtis returned to the set, oddly enough on the day of Barnabas’ first appearance, he purportedly told Costello that he had sent back the wrong photo; he had meant to hire someone else.
However, director John Sedwick remembers it differently. “We felt Jonathan had a wonderful, mysterious sort of quality.”
Or as Robert Costello puts it: “When Jonathan Frid appeared, we said, that’s it. A couple of days later, he was in the coffin.”
That coffin was a problem for Jonathan for the next four years. It was actually an inch or two shy of his six-foot height, so he was forced to lie in it with his knees bent.
But the casket was not the only difficulty for Jonathan on Dark Shadows. Another problem was that Frid had always been a slow study. And he was now expected to learn a script a day. He also was to play values and plan moments, interpreting the script, even when he had pages of dialogue to learn. As such, Frid says, “I couldn’t get the bloody lines down!” Actors have access to the Teleprompter with dialogue rolling steadily. But Jonathan was not comfortable using the Tele-prompter and preferred not to rely it.
“The first year was absolute hell for me every single day. It was like jumping off a cliff into water thousands of feet below. Every day I had to do it whether I liked it or not. I pushed myself. And I think I wore all the silver off that cane. There are some actors who can learn their lines going home in a taxi. They can come back the next morning and not miss one cue. But memorizing the lines was murder to me.”
But as with actors of Frid’s caliber, he utilized his emotions to flesh out his character. Frid reflects: “Barnabas’ ill ease as a stranger in the house, someone clearly out of his element, and all of this against his essential will, were very much in keeping with my own actor’s feelings at that time. I was a stranger there, on network television, out of my element. I was absolutely certain for weeks that I was about to be fired on the spot. Partly because I also couldn’t remember names. Roger and David and Carolyn and Maggie—they all just ran together for me.
“I worried the whole weekend after we taped my first episode. When I got back Monday morning, I said, I must a
pologize for Friday. I’m sure you people will never forgive me. And they said, what do you mean? I said, what do you mean? I got all my lines, all those introductions wrong. They said, oh, yeah, you mixed up a couple of names, but you were on close-up so we didn’t know who you were talking to. I thought it was a catastrophe and they just shrugged away my concern.”
Frid’s only comfort in all of this was the chance to work with an actress of Joan Bennett’s stature, along with the realization that the job was only temporary.
Soon...in a matter of weeks...Barnabas would bite the wrong neck, Frid thought, and that would be the end of him. Jonathan could dispense with the line-cramming and all the other necessary rituals and difficult conditions of commercial, low-cost, high-output, live-on-tape daytime television to become a professor of drama.
In preparing for his debut, wardrobe designer Ramse Mostoller outfitted Frid with two “mod” suits from Ohrbach’s, with the intent of making Barnabas look vaguely Edwardian.
The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection Page 8