In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  Kate could understand that. This featureless WWII bunker, turned over to the production as a command center, stood in ancient mountains, dwarfed by the tall trees. As an outpost of civilization in a savage land, it was ugly and ineffective.

  When approached to act as a technical adviser to Coppola’s Dracula, she had thought it might be interesting to see where it all started: the Changes, the Terror, the Transformation. No one seriously believed vampirism began here, but it was where Dracula came from. This land had nurtured him through centuries before he decided to spread his wings and extend his bloodline around the world.

  Three months had already been revised as six months. This production didn’t have a schedule, it had a sentence. A few were already demanding parole.

  Some vampires felt Transylvania should be the undead Israel, a new state carved out of the much-redrawn map of Central Europe, a geographical and political homeland. As soon as it grew from an inkling to a notion, Nicolae Ceausescu vigorously vetoed the proposition. Holding up in one hand a silver-edged sickle, an iron-headed hammer and a sharpened oak spar, the Premier reminded the world that “In Romania, we know how to treat leeches—a stake through the heart and off with their filthy heads.” But the Transylvania Movement—back to the forests, back to the mountains—gathered momentum: some elders, after ninety years of the chaos of the larger world, wished to withdraw to their former legendary status. Many of Kate’s generation, turned in the 1880s, Victorians stranded in this mechanistic century, were sympathetic.

  “You’re the Irish vampire lady,” Harrison Ford, flown in for two days to play Dr. Seward as a favor, had said. “Where’s your castle?”

  “I have a flat in Clerkenwell,” she admitted. “Over an off-license.”

  In the promised Transylvania, all elders would have castles, fiefdoms, slaves, human cattle. Everyone would wear evening dress. All vampires would have treasures of ancient gold, like leprechauns. There would be a silk-lined coffin in every crypt, and every night would be a full moon. Unlife eternal and luxury without end, bottomless wells of blood and Paris-label shrouds.

  Kate thought the Movement lunatic. Never mind cooked breakfasts and (the other crew complaint) proper toilet paper, this was an intellectual desert, a country without conversation, without (and she recognized the irony) life.

  She understood Dracula had left Transylvania in the first place not merely because he—the great dark sponge—had sucked it dry, but because even he was bored with ruling over gypsies, wolves and mountain streams. That did not prevent the elders of the Transylvania Movement from claiming the Count as their inspiration and using his seal as their symbol. An Arthurian whisper had it that once vampires returned to Transylvania, Dracula would rise again to assume his rightful throne as their ruler.

  Dracula meant so much to so many. She wondered if there was anything left inside so many meanings, anything concrete and inarguable and true. Or was he now just a phantom, a slave to anyone who cared to invoke his name? So many causes and crusades and rebellions and atrocities. One man, one monster, could never have kept track of them all, could never have encompassed so much mutually exclusive argument.

  There was the Dracula of the histories, the Dracula of Stoker’s book, the Dracula of this film, the Dracula of the Transylvania Movement. Dracula, the vampire and the idea, was vast. But not so vast that he could cast his cloak of protection around all who claimed to be his followers. Out here in the mountains where the Count had passed centuries in petty predation, Kate understood that he must in himself have felt tiny, a lizard crawling down a rock.

  Nature was overwhelming. At night, the stars were laser-points in the deep velvet black of the sky. She could hear, taste and smell a thousand flora and fauna. If ever there was a call of the wild, this forest exerted it. But there was nothing she considered intelligent life.

  She tied tight under her chin the yellow scarf, shot through with golden traceries, she had bought at Biba in 1969. It was a flimsy, delicate thing, but to her it meant civilization, a colored moment of frivolity in a life too often preoccupied with monochrome momentousness.

  Francis jumped up and down and threw script pages to the winds. His arms flapped like wings. Clouds of profanity enveloped the uncaring Keitel.

  “Don’t you realize I’ve put up my own fucking money for this fucking picture,” he shouted, not just at Keitel but at the whole company. “I could lose my house, my vineyard, everything. I can’t afford a fucking honorable failure. This has abso-goddamn-lutely got to outgross Jaws or I’m personally impaled up the ass with a sharpened telegraph pole.”

  Effects men sat slumped against the exterior wall of the bunker—there were few chairs on location—and watched their director rail at the heavens, demanding of God answers that were not forthcoming. Script pages swirled upwards in a spiral, spreading out in a cloud, whipping against the upper trunks of the trees, soaring out over the valley.

  “He was worse on Godfather,” one said.

  Servants usher Harker into a well-appointed drawing room. A table is set with an informal feast of bread, cheese and meat. Dr. Jack Seward, in a white coat with a stethoscope hung around his neck, warmly shakes Harker’s hand and leads him to the table. Quincey P. Morris sits to one side, tossing and catching a spade-sized bowie knife.

  Lord Godalming, well-dressed, napkin tucked into his starched collar, sits at the table, forking down a double helping of paprika chicken. Harker’s eyes meet Godalming’s, the nobleman looks away.

  SEWARD: Harker, help yourself to the fare, Jon. It’s uncommonly decent for foreign muck.

  HARKER: Thank you, no. I took repast at the inn.

  SEWARD: How is the inn? Natives bothering you? Superstitious babushkas, what?

  HARKER: I am well in myself.

  SEWARD: Splendid . . . the vampire, Countess Marya Dolingen of Graz. In 1883, you cut off her head and drove a hawthorn stake through her heart, destroying her utterly.

  HARKER: I’m not disposed just now to discuss such affairs.

  MORRIS: Come on, Jonny-Boy. You have a commendation from the church, a papal decoration. The frothing she-bitch is dead at last. Take the credit.

  HARKER: I have no direct knowledge of the individual you mention. And if I did, I reiterate that I would not be disposed to discuss such affairs.

  Seward and Morris exchange a look as Harker stands impassive. They know they have the right man. Godalming, obviously in command, nods.

  Seward clears plates of cold meat from a strong-box that stands on the table. Godalming hands the doctor a key, with which he opens the box. He takes out a woodcut and hands it over to Harker.

  The picture is of a knife-nosed mediaeval warrior prince.

  SEWARD: That’s Vlad Tepes, called ‘the Impaler.’ A good Christian, defender of the faith. Killed a million Turks. Son of the Dragon, they called him. Dracula.

  Harker is impressed.

  MORRIS: Prince Vlad had Orthodox Church decorations out the ass. Coulda made Metropolitan. But he converted, went over to Rome, turned Candle.

  HARKER: Candle?

  SEWARD: Roman Catholic.

  Harker looks again at the woodcut. In a certain light, it resembles the young Marlon Brando.

  Seward walks to a side-table, where an antique Dictaphone is set up. He fits a wax cylinder and adjusts the needle-horn.

  SEWARD: This is Dracula’s voice. It’s been authenticated. Seward cranks the Dictaphone.

  DRACULA’S VOICE: Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to them. What museek they maike!

  There is a strange distortion in the recording.

  HARKER: What’s that noise in the background?

  SEWARD: Wolves, my boy. Dire wolves, to be precise.

  DRACULA’S VOICE: To die, to be reallllly dead, that must be . . . gloriousssss!

  MORRIS: Vlad’s well beyond Rome now. He’s up there, in his impenetrable castle, continuing the crusade on his own. He’s got this army of Szekely Gypsies, fanatically loyal fucks. They follow his orders, n
o matter how atrocious, no matter how appalling. You know the score, Jon. Dead babies, drained cattle, defenestrated peasants, impaled grandmothers. He’s god-damned Un-Dead. A fuckin’ monster, boy.

  Harker is shocked. He looks again at the woodcut.

  SEWARD: The firm would like you to proceed up into the mountains, beyond the Borgo Pass . . .

  HARKER: But that’s Transylvania. We’re not supposed to be in Transylvania.

  Godalming looks to the heavens, but continues eating.

  SEWARD: . . . beyond the Borgo Pass, to Castle Dracula. There, you are to ingratiate yourself by whatever means come to hand into Dracula’s coterie. Then you are to disperse the Count’s household.

  HARKER: Disperse?

  Godalming puts down his knife and fork.

  GODALMING: Disperse with ultimate devotion.

  “What can I say, we made a mistake,” Francis said, shrugging nervously, trying to seem confident. He had shaved off his beard, superstitiously hoping that would attract more attention than his announcement. “I think this is the courageous thing to do, shut down and recast, rather than continue with a frankly unsatisfactory situation.”

  Kate did not usually cover showbiz, but the specialist press—Variety, Screen International, Positif—were dumbstruck enough to convince her it was not standard procedure to fire one’s leading man after two weeks’ work, scrap the footage and get someone else. When Keitel was sent home, the whole carnival ground to a halt and everyone had to sit around while Francis flew back to the States to find a new star.

  Someone asked how far over budget Dracula was, and Francis smiled and waffled about budgets being provisional.

  “No one ever asked how much the Sistine Chapel cost,” he said, waving a chubby hand. Kate would have bet that while Michelangelo was on his back with the brushes, Pope Julius II never stopped asking how much it cost and when would it be finished.

  During the break in shooting, money was spiraling down a drain. Fred Roos, the co-producer, had explained to her just how expensive it was to keep a whole company standing by. It was almost more costly than having them work.

  Next to Francis at the impromptu press conference in the Bucharest Town Hall was Martin Sheen, the new Jonathan Harker. In his mid-thirties, he looked much younger, like the lost boy he played in Badlands. The actor mumbled generously about the opportunity he was grateful for. Francis beamed like a shorn Santa Claus on a forced diet and opened a bottle of his own wine to toast his new star.

  The man from Variety asked who would be playing Dracula, and Francis froze in mid-pour, sloshing red all over Sheen’s wrist. Kate knew the title role—actually fairly small, thanks to Bram Stoker and screenwriter John Milius—was still on offer to various possibles—Klaus Kinski, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lee.

  “I can confirm Bobby Duvall will play Van Helsing,” Francis said. “And we have Dennis Hopper as Renfield. He’s the one who eats flies.”

  “But who is Dracula?”

  Francis swallowed some wine, attempted a cherubic look, and wagged a finger.

  “I think I’ll let that be a surprise. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I have motion picture history to make.”

  As Kate took her room-key from the desk, the night manager nagged her in Romanian. When she had first checked in, the door of her room fell off as she opened it. The hotel maintained she did not know her own vampire strength and should pay exorbitantly to have the door replaced. Apparently, the materials were available only at great cost and had to be shipped from Moldavia. She assumed it was a scam they worked on foreigners, especially vampires. The door was made of paper stretched over a straw frame, the hinges were cardboard fixed with drawing pins.

  She was pretending not to understand any language in which they tried to ask her for money, but eventually they would hit on English and she’d have to make a scene. Francis, light-hearted as a child at the moment, thought it rather funny and had taken to teasing her about the damn door.

  Not tired, but glad to be off the streets after nightfall, she climbed the winding stairs to her room, a cramped triangular space in the roof. Though she was barely an inch over five feet, she could only stand up straight in the dead center of the room. A crucifix hung ostentatiously over the bed, a looking glass was propped up on the basin. She thought about taking them down but it was best to let insults pass. In many ways, she preferred the campsite conditions in the mountains. She only needed to sleep every two weeks, and when she was out she was literally dead and didn’t care about clean sheets.

  They were all in Bucharest for the moment, as Francis supervised script-readings to ease Sheen into the Harker role. His fellow coach passengers—Fredric Forrest (Westenra), Sam Bottoms (Murray) and Albert Hall (Swales)—had all been on the project for over a year, and had been through all this before in San Francisco as Francis developed John Milius’s script through improvisation and happy accident. Kate didn’t think she would have liked being a screenwriter. Nothing was ever finished.

  She wondered who would end up playing Dracula. Since his marriage to Queen Victoria made him officially if embarrassingly a satellite of the British Royal Family, he had rarely been represented in films. However, Lon Chaney had taken the role in the silent London After Midnight, which dealt with the court intrigues of the 1880s, and Anton Walbrook played Vlad opposite Anna Neagle in Victoria the Great in 1937. Kate, a lifelong theatergoer who had never quite got used to the cinema, remembered Vincent Price opposite Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina in the 1930s.

  Aside from a couple of cheap British pictures which didn’t count, Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the singular mix of documentation and wish-fulfillment that inspired a revolution by showing how Dracula could have been defeated in the early days before his rise to power—had never been made as a film. Orson Welles produced it on radio in the 1930s and announced it as his first picture, casting himself as Harker and the Count, using first-person camera throughout. RKO thought it too expensive and convinced him to make Citizen Kane instead. Nearly ten years ago, Francis had lured John Milius into writing the first pass at the script by telling him nobody, not even Orson Welles, had ever been able to lick the book.

  Francis was still writing and rewriting, stitching together scenes from Milius’s script with new stuff of his own and pages torn straight from the book. Nobody had seen a complete script, and Kate thought one didn’t exist.

  She wondered how many times Dracula had to die for her to be rid of him. Her whole life had been a dance with Dracula, and he haunted her still. When Francis killed the Count at the end of the movie—if that was the ending he went with—maybe it would be for the last time. You weren’t truly dead until you’d died in a motion picture. Or at the box-office.

  The latest word was that the role was on offer to Marlon Brando. She couldn’t see it: Stanley Kowalski and Vito Corleone as Count Dracula. One of the best actors in the world, he’d been one of the worst Napoleons in the movies. Historical characters brought out the ham in him. He was terrible as Fletcher Christian too.

  Officially, Kate was still just a technical adviser—though she had never actually met Dracula during his time in London, she had lived through the period. She had known Stoker, Jonathan Harker, Godalming and the rest. Once, as a warm girl, she had been terrified by Van Helsing’s rages. When Stoker wrote his book and smuggled it out of prison, she had helped with its underground circulation, printing copies on the presses of the Pall Mall Gazette and ensuring its distribution despite all attempts at suppression. She wrote the introduction for the 1912 edition that was the first official publication.

  Actually, she found herself impressed into a multitude of duties. Francis treated a $20 million (and climbing) movie like a college play and expected everyone to pitch in, despite union rules designed to prevent the crew being treated as slave labor. She found the odd afternoon of sewing costumes or night of set-building welcome distraction.

  At first, Francis asked her thousands of questions about points of detai
l; now he was shooting, he was too wrapped up in his own vision to take advice. If she didn’t find something to do, she’d sit idle. As an employee of American Zoetrope, she couldn’t even write articles about the shoot. For once, she was on the inside, knowing but not telling.

  She had wanted to write about Romania for the New Statesman, but was under orders not to do anything that might jeopardize the cooperation the production needed from the Ceausescus. So far, she had avoided all the official receptions Nicolae and Elena hosted for the production. The Premier was known to be an extreme vampire-hater, especially since the stirrings of the Transylvania Movement, and occasionally ordered not-so-discreet purges of the undead. Kate knew she, like the few other vampires with the Dracula crew, was subject to regular checks by the Securitate. Men in black leather coats loitered in the corner of her eye.

  “For God’s sake,” Francis had told her, “don’t take anybody local.” Like most Americans, he didn’t understand. Though he could see she was a tiny woman with red hair and glasses, the mind of an aged aunt in the body of an awkward cousin, Francis could not rid himself of the impression that vampire women were ravening predators with unnatural powers of bewitchment, lusting after the pounding blood of any warm youth who happens along. She was sure he hung his door with garlic and wolfsbane, but half-hoped for a whispered solicitation.

  After a few uncomfortable nights in Communist-approved beer-halls, she had learned to stay in her hotel room while in Bucharest. People here had memories as long as her lifetime. They crossed themselves and muttered prayers as she walked by. Children threw stones.

  She stood at her window and looked out at the square. A patch of devastation, where the ancient quarter of the capital had been, marked the site of the palace Ceausescu was building for himself. A three-storey poster of the Savior of Romania stood amid the ruins. Dressed like an orthodox priest, he held up Dracula’s severed head as if he had personally killed the Count.