The Vampire Sextette Read online

  "I've never met Alucard, Jack. I'm checking into him for a client."

  "Still, if you get the chance, Gené. You know what it would mean to me. I'm

  fending off bill collectors, and Sharkko Press still hasn't come through for the

  Tenebrous Twilight limiteds. A development deal, even a rewrite or a polish,

  could get me through winter and spring. Buy me time to get down to Ensenada

  and finish some stories."

  She would have to promise. She had learned more than the bare facts. The

  light in Jack Martin's eyes told her something about John Alucard. He had some

  sort of magic effect, but she didn't know whether he was a conjurer or a wizard.

  Now she would have to build on that.

  Short of forcing her way into Alucard's office and asking outright whether he

  was planning on leaving Orson Welles in the lurch, there wasn't much more she

  could do. After Martin, she made a few phone calls to industry contacts, looked

  over recent back numbers of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and hit a couple

  of showbiz watering holes, hoping to soak up gossip.

  Now, Geneviève was driving back along the Pacific Coast Highway to Paradise

  Cove. The sun was down, and a heavy, unstarred darkness hung over the sea. The

  Plymouth, which she sometimes suspected of having a mind of its own, handled

  gently, taking the blind curves at speed. She twiddled the radio past a lot of disco

  and found a station pumping out two-tone. That was good, that was new, that was

  a culture still alive.

  "… mirror in the bathroom, recompense all my crimes of self-defence…"

  She wondered about what she had learned.

  It wasn't like the old days, when the studios were tight little fiefdoms and a

  stringer for Louella Parsons would know everything going on in town and every

  current scandal. Most movies weren't even made in Hollywood any more, and the

  studios were way down on the lists of interests owned by multinational

  corporations with other primary concerns. The buzz was that United Artists might

  well be changing its name to TransAmerica Pictures.

  General word confirmed most of what Martin had told her, and turned up

  surprisingly few extra details. Besides the Welles deal, financed off his own line of

  credit with no studio production coin as yet involved, John Alucard had projects

  in development all over town, with high-end talent attached. He was supposed to

  be in bed with Michael Cimino, still hot off The Deer Hunter, on The Lincoln

  County Wars, a Western about the vampire outlaw Billy the Kid and a massacre of

  settlers in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1870s. With the Mill -Simpson-Phillips

  setup, he was helping the long-in-development Anne Rice project, Interview With

  the Mummy, which Elaine May was supposed to be making with Cher and Ryan

  O'Neal, unless it was Nancy Walker, with Diana Ross and Mark Spitz.

  In an interview in the Reporter, Alucard said, "The pursuit of making money is

  the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have

  no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our

  obligation is to make money." A lot of execs, and not a few directors and writers,

  found his a refreshing and invigorating stance, though Geneviève had the

  impression Alucard was parroting someone else's grand theory. If he truly

  believed what he said, and was not just laying down something the studios'

  corporate owners wanted to hear, then John Alucard did not sound like someone

  who would happily want to be in business with Orson Welles. Apart from

  anything else, his manifesto was a 1980s rewrite, at five times the length with in built repetition to get through to the admass morons at the back of the hall, of

  "showmanship, not genius."

  The only thing she couldn't find out was what his projects really were. Besides

  Welles's Dracula, which wasn't mentioned by anyone she had talked with, and the

  long-gestating shows he was working with senior production partners, he had a

  half dozen other irons in the fire. Directors and stars were attached, budgets set,

  start dates announced, but no titles ever got mentioned, and the descriptions in the

  trades—"intense drama," "romantic comedy"—were hardly helpful. That was

  interesting and unusual. John Alucard was making a splash, waves radiating

  outwards, but surely he eventually would have to say what the pictures were. Or

  had that become the least important part of the package? An agent at CAA told

  her that for men like Alucard, the art was in the deal not on the screen.

  That did worry her.

  Could it be that there wasn't actually a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?

  The man was a vampire, but was he also a phantom? No photographs existed, of

  course. Everyone had a secondhand description, always couched as a casting

  suggestion: a young Louis Jourdan, a smart Jack Palance, a rough-trade David

  Niven. It was agreed that the man was European, a long time ago. No one had any

  idea how long he had been a vampire, even. He could be a newborn, fresh-killed

  and risen last year, or a centuried elder who had changed his face a dozen times.

  His name always drew the same reaction: excitement, enthusiasm, fear. There was

  a sense that John Alucard was getting things on the road, and that it'd be a smart

  career move to get close to him, to be ready to haul out of the station with him.

  She cruised across sandy tarmac into the trailer park. The seafood restaurant

  was doing a little New Year's Day business. She would be thirsty soon.

  Someone sat on the stairs of her trailer, leaning back against her door, hands

  loose in his lap, legs in chinos, cowboy boots.

  Someone dead.

  Throughout Welles's career, Dracula remained an idée fixe. The

  Welles-Mankiewicz script was RKO property, and the studio resisted

  Welles's offer to buy it back. They set their asking price at the notional

  but substantial sum accountants reckoned had been lost on the double

  debacle of Ambersons and the unfinished South American project, It's

  All True.

  When Schaefer, Welles's patron, was removed from his position as

  Vice-President in Charge of Production and replaced by Charles

  Koerner, there was serious talk of putting the script into production

  through producer Val Lewton's unit, which had established a reputation

  for low-budget supernatural dramas with Cat People (1942). Lewton

  got as far as having DeWitt Bodeen and then Curt Siodmak take runs at

  further drafts, scaling the script down to fit a straitjacket budget.

  Jacques Tourneur was attached to direct, though editor Mark Robson

  was considered when Tourneur was promoted to A pictures. Stock

  players were assigned supporting roles: Tom Conway (Dr. Seward),

  Kent Smith (Jonathan Harker), Henry Daniell (Van Helsing), Jean

  Brooks (Lucy), Alan Napier (Arthur Holmwood), Skelton Knaggs

  (Renfield), Elizabeth Russell (Countess Marya Dolingen), Sir Lancelot

  (a calypso-singing coachman). Simone Simon, star of Cat People, was

  set for Mina, very much the focus of Lewton's take on the story, but

  the project fell through because RKO were unable to secure their first

  and only choice of star, Boris Karloff, who was committed to Arsenic

  and Old Lace on Broadway.

/>   In 1944, RKO sold the Welles-Mankiewicz script, along with a

  parcel of set designs, to 20th Century-Fox. Studio head Darryl F.

  Zanuck offered Welles the role of Dracula, promising Joan Fontaine

  and Olivia dc Havilland for Mina and Lucy, suggesting Tyrone Power

  (Jonathan), George Sanders (Arthur), John Carradine (Quincey) and

  Laird Cregar (Van Helsing). This Dracula would have been a follow-up

  to Fox's successful Welles-Fontaine Jane Eyre (1943), and Welles

  might have committed if Zanuck had again assigned weak-willed Robert

  Stevenson, allowing Welles to direct in everything but credit. However,

  on a project this "important," Zanuck would consider only two

  directors; John Ford had no interest—sparing us John Wayne, Victor

  McLaglen, Ward Bond, and John Agar as brawling, boozing, fearless

  vampire slayers—so it inevitably fell to Henry King, a specialist in

  molasses-slow historical subjects like Lloyd's of London (1936) and

  Brigham Young (1940). King, a plodder who had a brief flash of

  genius in a few later films with Gregory Peck, had his own, highly

  developed, chocolate box style and gravitas, and was not a congenial

  director for Welles, whose mercurial temperament was unsuited to

  methods he considered conservative and dreary. The film still might

  have been made, since Welles was as ever in need of money, but

  Zanuck went cold on Dracula at the end of the war when the Count was

  moving into his Italian exile.

  Fox wound up backing Prince of Foxes (1949), directed by King,

  with Power and Welles topping the cast, shot on location in Europe. A

  lavish bore, enlivened briefly by Welles's committed Cesare Borgia, this

  suggests what the Zanuck Dracula might have been like. Welles used

  much of his earnings from the long shoot to pour into film projects

  made in bits and pieces over several years: the completed Othello

  (1952), the unfinished Don Quixote (begun 1955) and, rarely mentioned

  until now, yet another Dracula. El conde Dracula, a French-ItalianMexican-American-Irish-Liechtensteinian-British-Yugoslav-MoroccanIranian coproduction, was shot in snippets, the earliest dating from

  1949, the latest from 1972.

  Each major part was taken by several actors, or single actors over a

  span of years. In the controversial edit supervised by the Spaniard

  Jesus Franco—a second-unit director on Welles's Chimes at Midnight

  (1966)—and premiered at Cannes in 1997, the cast is as follows: Akim

  Tamiroff (Van Helsing), Micheál MacLiammóir (Jonathan), Paola Mori

  (Mina), Michael Redgrave (Arthur), Patty McCormick (Lucy), Hilton

  Edwards (Dr. Seward), Mischa Auer (Renfield). The vampire brides are

  played by Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Cloutier, and Katina Paxinou, shot

  in different years on different continents. There is no sight of Francisco

  Reiguera, Welles's Quixote, cast as a skeletal Dracula, and the Count is

  present only as a substantial shadow voiced (as are several other

  characters) by Welles himself. Much of the film runs silent, and a

  crucial framing story, explaining the multinarrator device, was either

  never filmed or shot and lost. Jonathan's panicky exploration of his

  castle prison, filled with steam like the Turkish bath in Othello, is the

  most remarkable, purely Expressionist scene Welles ever shot. But the

  final ascent to Castle Dracula, with Tamiroff dodging patently papier-

  mâché falling boulders and wobbly zooms into and out of stray details

  hardly seems the work of anyone other than a fumbling amateur.

  In no sense "a real film," El conde Dracula is a scrapbook of

  images from the novel and Welles's imagination. He told Henry Jaglom

  that he considered the project a private exercise, to keep the subject in

  his mind, a series of sketches for a painting he would execute later. As

  Francis Coppola would in 1977, while his multimillion-dollar Dracula

  was bogged down in production problems in Romania, Welles often

  made comparisons with the Sistine Chapel. While Coppola invoked

  Michelangelo with some desperation as the vast machine of his movie

  seemed to be collapsing around him, Welles always resorted playfully

  to the metaphor, daring the interviewer with a wave and a wink and a

  deep chuckle to suggest the Pope probably did turn up every day

  wanting to know when the great artist would be finished and how much

  it was going to cost.

  In 1973, Welles assembled some El conde Dracula footage, along

  with documentary material about the real Count Dracula and the

  scandals that followed his true death in 1959: the alleged, much disputed will that deeded much of his vast fortune to English housewife

  Vivian Nicholson, who claimed she had encountered Dracula while on a

  school holiday in the early fifties; the autobiography Clifford Irving sold

  for a record-breaking advance in 1971, only to have the book exposed

  as an arrant fake written by Irving in collaboration with Fred

  Saberhagen; the squabbles among sundry vampire elders, notably

  Baron Meinster and Princess Asa Vajda, as to who should claim the

  Count's unofficial title as ruler of their kind. Welles called this playful,

  essaylike film—constructed around the skeleton of footage shot by

  Calvin Floyd for his own documentary, In Search of Dracula (1971)—

  When Are You Going to Finish el conde Dracula?, though it was

  exhibited in most territories as D Is for Dracula. On the evening

  Premier Ceausescu withdrew the Romanian Cavalry needed for

  Coppola's assault on Castle Dracula in order to pursue the vampire

  banditti of the Transylvania Movement in the next valley, Francis Ford

  Coppola held a private screening of D Is for Dracula and cabled

  Welles that there was a curse on anyone who dared invoke the dread

  name.

  Gates, ibid.

  The someone on her steps was truly dead. In his left chest, over his punctured

  heart, a star-shaped blotch was black in the moonlight.

  Geneviève felt no residue. The intangible thing—immortal soul, psychic energy,

  battery power—which kept mind and body together, in nosferatu or the warm,

  was gone.

  Broken is the golden bowl, the spirit flown forever.

  She found she was crying. She touched her cheek and looked at the thick, salt,

  red tears, then smeared them away on her handkerchief.

  It was Moondoggie. In repose, his face looked old, the lines his smile had

  made appealing turned to slack wrinkles.

  She took a moment with him, remembering the taste of the living man, that he

  was the only one who called her "Gidget," his inability to put in words what it was

  about surfing that made him devote his life to it (he'd been in pre-med once, long,

  long ago—when there was a crack-up or a near-drowning, the doctor he might

  have been would surface and take over), and the rush of the seas that came with

  his blood.

  That man was gone. Besides sorrow at the waste, she was angry. And afraid.

  It was easy to see how it had happened. The killer had come close, face-toface, and stuck Moondoggie through the heart. The wound was round, not a slit.

  The weapon was probably a wooden stake or a sharpened metal pole. The angle

  of the wound was upwards, so the killer was shorter than
the rangy surfer. Stuck

  through, Moondoggie had been carefully propped up on her doorstep. She was

  being sent a message.

  Moondoggie was a warm man, but he'd been killed as if he were like her, a

  vampire.

  He was not cold yet. The killing was recent.

  Geneviève turned in a half circle, looking out across the beach. Like most

  vampires, she had above average night vision for a human being—without sun

  glare bleaching everything bone white, she saw better than by day —but no

  hawklike power of distinguishing far-off tiny objects or magical X-ray eyesight.

  It was likely that the assassin was nearby, watching to see that the message was

  received. Counting on the popular belief that vampires did have unnatural eyesight,

  she moved slowly enough that anyone in concealment might think she was looking

  directly at them, that they had been seen.

  A movement.

  The trick worked. A couple of hundred yards off, beyond the trailer park, out

  on the beach, something—someone—moved, clambering upright from a hollow

  depression in the dry sand.

  As the probable murderer stood, Geneviève saw a blonde ponytail whipping. It

  was a girl, mid-to-late teens, in halter top and denim shorts, with a wispy gauze

  neck scarf, and—suggestive detail—running shoes and knee pads. She was

  undersized but athletic. Another girl midget: no wonder she'd been able to get

  close enough to Moondoggie, genial connoisseur of young bodies, to stab him in

  the heart.

  She assumed the girl would bolt. Geneviève was fast enough to run her down,

  but the killer ought to panic. In California, what people knew about vampires was

  scrambled with fantasy and science fiction.

  For once, Geneviève was tempted to live up to her image. She wanted to rip

  out the silly girl's throat.

  (and drink)

  She took a few long steps, flashing forwards across the beach.

  The girl stood her ground, waiting.

  Geneviève had pause. The stake wasn't in the dead man's chest. The girl still

  had it. Her right hand was out of sight, behind her back.

  Closer, she saw the killer's face in the moonlight. Doll-pretty, with an upturned

  nose and the faintest fading traces of freckles. She was frowning with

  concentration now but probably had a winning smile, perfect teeth. She should be