Dracula strode with fluttering cape to his coffin beneath the gibbet and assumed a realistically dignified pose. Lara Lee was sprawled out by a portable radio and a blond teenage ghoul with a crewcut and holding a snaky wig in his hand began to cue her lines.
Then I realized why Dracula was so impressive. He was genuine. Everything else was phony, cheap, artificial. But Dracula actually looked like a vampire. It wasn’t merely the skilled and highly artistic make-up — it was his bearing, his confidence, his dignity. It was, in a word, his sincerity. He was a real actor of the old school. And then I remembered who he was. Although I had been around Smogville for some time, he had been here long before me.
“Why,” I said, “that’s Ernst Von Kroft!”
“Yup,” Morty said. I poured another slug of bourbon into his Dixie cup. “That’s Von Kroft, all right.” He chuckled. “The greatest Monster of them all.”
“He was top box office in horror stuff once,” I said. “Where’s he been?”
Morty laughed, loudly. “That’s obvious. He’s been dead. Now he’s back from the grave.”
Von Kroft glanced our way and I was sure he had heard Morty’s comment. Again I was embarrassed. I had been embarrassed a great deal lately, usually whenever I sobered up long enough to realize the kind of stuff I was writing.
Morty jumped up. “All right,” he yelled. “Into your sacred earth, Dracula. Lara Lee, strip down to the barest shred of decency.”
“Don’t rush me,” Lara Lee giggled, and she started ripping her clothes down to the desired shred of barest decency. That was the trouble with all of it: she should have looked ravished, but she only looked bored.
Von Kroft did not look bored. He lowered himself into his coffin with such eerie conviction that it chilled me through and through. A white hand slithered over the coffin’s rim and writhed like a hungry crab...
Two hours later the scene was finished, and it was the worst yet — too nauseating even to be amusing. Perhaps the worst thing about it was the utter blasé contempt — no, not even contempt — the utter glibness of what had been put on film.
Except Von Kroft. He was superb. He played his scene with a skill and feeling I had forgotten existed in the theater. He was completely involved in the part. When Lara Lee forgot important lines, Von Kroft filled in with an extemporaneous monologue that topped anything I could have dreamed up — even when I was really trying.
Then everyone made for the exits and their sports cars — the teenagers with their ghoulish masks. Morty with his racing form, and the bored technicians. Only Von Kroft and I were left in the graveyard.
He didn’t know I was there. He sat on a papier-maché rock for some time, then got up stiffly and shuffled toward the exit. Suddenly he bent over, caught his breath, and put his hand over his heart. A dusty prop teetered and almost fell as he leaned on it.
He looked up as I touched his shoulder and asked if he was all right. All I could see of the person under all that make-up were his eyes and they were moist with a sort of controlled gratitude.
“The truth is that I haven’t donned make-up for some time and it has been somewhat of a strain.”
I poured what remained of my bourbon into a Dixie cup and he downed it gratefully. “Thank you, friend—”
“Fred Logan,” I said.
“Ah, you were the writer.”
I didn’t say anything more about that, and he never mentioned it again.
“You feel like driving home?” I asked.
“I have nothing to drive home at the moment. I’ll walk. I live a few blocks away — over on North Gower.”
“I’ll give you a lift,” I said. “You got anything to drink at your place?”
His hand trembled and his voice choked with emotion. “I believe I can scare up something, Mr. Logan, I do not often have guests these days.”
“I’ll pick up something on the way,” I said. “Hell, we ought to celebrate. That was a great performance you gave today, Mr. Von Kroft. Ballew intends doing a series of these things and he’ll have plenty of work for you.”
“Yes,” he said as we drove through the poisonous smog and turned off Sunset and down Gower between rows of ratty palm trees. “A celebration certainly is in order. It’s coming back now.”
“What’s coming back?”
“The cycle of horror movies,” Von Kroft said softly. “It’s coming back, and I’ve been waiting a long time.”
His thin lips were tight.
He lived in an ancient rooming house that the Hollywood Freeway had passed by. It was an odd, suspended sort of neighborhood, preserved in dusty timelessness. Above it were the Hollywood Hills rich with pastel houses and odd-shaped swimming pools; below it was Hollywood Boulevard. And Von Kroft’s rooming house just sat there, and no one seemed to care any more. It was really very old, with cupolas and a bell tower, and surrounded by untended masses of rosebushes, wisteria, and untrimmed palm trees whose branches hung dry and brown, like dead grass skirts.
Von Kroft had a closet-sized room on the second floor. As the chintz curtain blew to the side I saw the smoggy dust of the vacant lot next door. I’m not usually bothered by heat, but coming up the stairs had given me a stifled feeling and now I sat on the unmade bed conscious of my energy oozing out through every pore.
Von Kroft had, with some difficulty, got out of his make-up, and the remains of it now lay scattered in tatters and tufts about the room. He was somewhere down the hall washing. I kept seeing the face and body exposed as his make-up and costume came away. Physically, he was in poor condition. He was quite an old man, and I knew his heart was bad. His face had been a dead-gray, and a line of blue rimmed his fleshless lips.
I had to admit to myself that I had become interested in Von Kroft. I had to admit also that I didn’t want to go to my own apartment and sit there alone, faced with the bourbon bottle and the necessity of starting a third phony horror pic for Ballew. Another day or so and I Was a Juvenile Delinquent Vampire would be finished, and soon it would be playing all over the country — my great contribution to cinematic history. Meanwhile, I was expected to be working on another masterpiece of the silver screen.
Von Kroft returned. Scrawny in his tattered bathrobe of faded silk, he still possessed an unbelievable dignity. From somewhere he had got a tray of ice cubes and a lime. He prepared highballs and we sat sipping cool drinks while I watched some of the dangerous tension ebb out of him.
He was one of those who make handsome old men. He had a sharp angular profile. And even before he showed me his albums, and collections of old showbills, pictures, newspaper notices, and programs, I knew that he must have been a very handsome fellow.
“Yes,” he told me later, “I was quite the matinee idol in Hungary when I was young. Here, I wasn’t the type somehow. I had to do character work, but then I always preferred character work.”
Later he dragged an old trunk from under the bed. It was decorated with faded labels. I began to forget where I was. That room seemed to be at the edge — on the boundary between night and day...
I learned that he was from the Caucasus, a poor but experienced actor with a Continental flavor. He had foreseen a great artistic future for films, so he had come to Hollywood where he hung around for years doing minor character bits and appearing in little theaters along Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. It was one of those unexplainable things — a fine talent that simply didn’t get the right combination of breaks.
And then, invisible but electric under a hundred pounds of makeup, Von Kroft played his first Monster role. He insisted on doing all his own make-up work, and had literally spent weeks in preparation. He made a probing study of the Monster — did a real character breakdown of a shattered soul hiding in a Monster’s body. The resulting fame astonished everyone. It wasn’t the make-up, although that was hideously effective. His impact derived from the depth of character, from the genuine pathos he had given to a grotesque which had not been intended originally as anything but a prop to show off the virginal white body of a posturing starlet.