What I Did For Love: House on Haunted Hill

Writer Toby Roan – master of the 50 Westerns From the Fifties blog – invited various bloggers to write about films made by, or distributed through, Allied Artists.  Most of the films distributed through AA were, to put it politely, junk.  AA distributed hoards of Bowery Boys films, cut-rate Charlie Chan mysteries, Bomba the Jungle Boy flicks (a particular favorite here at The Jade Sphinx), and a seeming endless stream of westerns.

I’m sure Marshall Roan was hoping for a saddlebag full of westerns for his blogathon; and, knowing my love of westerns, it would only make sense that I comply.  So … to be utterly contrary, I decided to look at a horror film instead (!), starring arts-advocate and Renaissance Man Vincent Price (1911-1993).

There are movies that all of us saw in our childhood that we have returned to again and again.  One movie that I have been looking at all of my life is House on Haunted Hill (1959).  I am not blind (nor immune) to the many faults of this picture.  The screenplay makes almost no sense – and even less sense once everything is “explained.”  (It doesn’t even possess much of the internal logic necessary for the suspension of disbelief.)  The pacing is at times dodgy.  The special effects aren’t cheesy as much as they are silly. 

It is … irresistible.  I recently re-viewed this film before writing this piece, and just thinking about it inspires me to fire-up the DVD player once again.

The plot, briefly, is this:  eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Price) invites five strangers to a “haunted house” party he is throwing to amuse his fourth wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).  He promises the survivors (or their heirs) $10,000 if they stay the night – the doors will be locked at midnight, and it would be impossible to get in or out of the house.

The five guests include newspaper columnist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum, who is terrific), test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Loren’s employee Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig, who screams fetchingly), and the house’s owner, Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook). 

Of course, there are all kinds of wonderful spook-show shenanigans.  Annabelle hangs herself (or does she?); Nora finds a severed head in her luggage (no TSA in those days); Schroeder is taken out of the action with a blow to the noggin in a dark closet; and Watson slowly gets drunker and drunker while warning everyone that they will die horribly before the night is out.  And did I mention there was a vat of acid in the basement?

House on Haunted Hill was produced and directed by the legendary William Castle (1914-1977).  Castle specialized in budget horror and suspense thrillers; but the real key to his peculiar genius was in marketing his films.  The Tingler (1959), about a lobster-like monster that … sort of tingles you to death, premiered in theaters wired with vibrating chairs.  The process was called Percepto – and Your Correspondent saw a revival of The Tingler at New York’s Film Forum, complete with vibrating chairs.  I still haven’t recovered.  His film 13 Ghosts (1960) included special red and blue glasses to see the ghosts.  Mr. Sardonicus (1961) allowed viewers to vote on the fate of the film’s villain.

House on Haunted Hill had as its gimmick a process called Emergo – where things actually come out of the screen.  At the key moment of the climax when a skeleton menaces one of the protagonists, a cardboard skeleton came out via a clothesline in select theaters.  I saw that at Film Forum as well, where the audience hooted in delirious derision, throwing popcorn and jujubes at the skeleton.  Take that, The Force Awakens.

There is no reason for this stuff to work, but it does.  Part of it is the performances, which are unusually fine.  Ohmart, as Price’s evil, ice-queen bride, is simply fabulous.  Sexy, scheming, clearly intelligent and purring like an over-fed cat, Ohmart delivers work that would not be out of place in a bigger-budget film noir.  Speaking of film noir, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe’s friend Elisha Cook performs with an admirable amount of intense terror – this is a man drinking himself into stupefaction because any other option is too horrifying to contemplate. Cook plays hysteria without ever becoming a cartoon, and it reminds us that he was actually a terrific actor with the right material.  Mitchum adds wonderful support as the sophisticated (but tough) newspaper columnist.  See this film and wonder … why wasn’t this woman a bigger star?

Vincent Price, however, completely owns House on Haunted Hill.  Though he had made horror pictures before (including House of Wax and The Fly), this is the film where Price finally honed his screen persona.  Tongue planted firmly in cheek, this is mischievous villainy; one could say that he served his nastiness on wry.  It’s not that Price delivers a camp performance (and, though that charge has been leveled against him, he never really did); but, rather, Price had a genius for making the audience complicit with him.  Price was a heavy who twinkled, and he carried out his most evil machinations on the balls of his feet.

He uses all of his many gifts to great effect here.  His silken, velvety voice brings the right touch of ironic menace to such lines as, “these miniature coffins were my wife’s idea – she’s so amusing;” or, my favorite, “remember the fun we had the night you poisoned me.”  In addition to his voice, he uses his imposing height, his infallible sense of comedic timing, and his look of blasé sophistication.  It really wasn’t until this film that he fully owned his own screen persona, and watching Vincent Price blossom is the chief delight of House on Haunted Hill.

Somehow, House on Haunted Hill has fallen into the public domain, and can be seen readily online.  Here is a Youtube link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwhfqgzsuVU.  Spend an hour and fifteen minutes at The House on Haunted Hill.  You won’t be disappointed.

We Get Letters

One of the many benefits of conducting one’s education publicly, as we try to do here at the Jade Sphinx, is that our broad range of subjects brings us a broad range of letters.  (Oh, very well … emails; but it doesn’t sound quite the same, does it?)

Without further ado, let’s dip into our mailbag in-box, and see what we have there.

You write about children’s literature a great deal.  Do you think that’s a fit subject for adult criticism?

Short answer: yes.  In fact, I’m rather surprised at the question.  There are many children’s books – the works of Andersen, Grahame, Milne and Barrie come to mind – that rank among the most important novels in the language.  More important – a truly interesting children’s book can be read on multiple levels.  I believe that children are amused by the animal shenanigans to be found in Wind in the Willows, while adults will pause at the more subtle philosophical asides and implications. And if my home were sinking into a concrete quagmire, I would salvage a great many classic children’s books from my library before I grabbed many contemporary novels.

And keeping on a contemporary note, some of the most interesting things on bookshelves today are found in children’s books.  Look at the rich imaginative world of William Joyce, for example.

Do you really hate all rock music, or is that an affectation?  And if you do, how do you avoid it?

I am nothing but a catalog of affectations.  But, seriously, yes, I have hated most all popular music from the rock era onwards.  It’s not simply that all of it is bad – though it is; or that it is very bad for you – though it is that, too; rather, it is simply because we have lost so much by embracing so little.  The palette from which rock (and funk, pop, bubblegum, rap … and all the other playground words we use to describe it) paints with sound is a very limited one, indeed.  We now find ourselves in a musical landscape which has very little room for romantic love, or simple idealism, or even, it seems, common decency.  It is no surprise that mores and society have both degraded since the advent of rock.  If a personal library is the measure of a man, then popular music is the measure of a people, and what our music says about us flatters no one.  When contemplating contemporary music, it is inexplicable to me that we do not all simply retreat from it in shame.

As for hiding from it … it is a continual battle.

I found your lamenting a lack of humor in The Iliad and The Homesman to be more than a little quirky.  Do you really think that humor can be found in most anything?

This reminds me of another reader who asked how an aesthete could have a sense of humor.  I think the only possible reply is that an aesthete must have one.

True story: my husband and I were leaving Cambodia on our way to Thailand.  We were at the airport, going through customs.  The customs agent processing my husband’s passport looked at him, looked at the document, stamped it, and nodded him on.  My customs agent looked at me, looked at my passport, looked at me, looked at my passport…. Finally stamping it and holding it out to me.  But – before I could take it, he snatched it away and held up and tiny, printed sign that read, TEN DOLLARS COFFEE MONEY.  I cocked an eyebrow at him and countered, “how much do you want for tea?”

What encounter with art changed you profoundly?

Too many to list here.  Perhaps the most formative was a one-man show by John Gay about Oscar Wilde called Diversions and Delights.  It starred Vincent Price and I went multiple times in my early teenage years.  I’ve never been the same.

When the Apollo Belvedere came to New York as part of the touring Vatican show – again in my teenage years – I stood before it for hours, transfixed.  Here, I thought, was something utterly and completely perfect in every way. 

After reading your piece on the New American Philistine, I suggest you leave your mother’s basement and walk around the real-world for a bit.

Many thanks for the breath of fresh air.  Or something.

Brickbats aside, America isn’t the Land of the Philistine, it’s the Promised Land of the Philistine.  We don’t want to hear it, and pretend that all aesthetic opinions are created equal, and that democratization of taste allows the cream to rise to the top.  But none of that, however, is quite true.  Signs of our cultural decay are all around us, and plain to see.  We are gorging ourselves on junk, and it is killing us. 

Do you have questions?  Send them in for a future column!

Alan Young Interview, Part IV

We conclude our interview with Alan Young (born 1918) as he reminisces about his dealing with Disney, and the creation of Scrooge McDuck.

Let's go to Disney for a moment and your voice work for Scrooge McDuck, for Mickey's Christmas Carol.

I wrote Mickey's Christmas Carol in the 1970s as a recording for children. I did it for Disney. I played Mickey, and Goofy, and, of course, Scrooge, because that was my old accent. Then it became a movie, and then it became Duck Tales. So I stayed with it.

Are you happy with the association?

I'd rather let that pass. I had a lawsuit with them, because they weren't supposed to make a movie without my permission, and I didn't realize that in my contract. And my partner, on his deathbed, said to his girlfriend, "Tell Alan that Disney should not have made that movie without his permission!" So I got a lawyer and we sued, but the statute of limitations had just run out, it was just seven years!

I'm so sorry!

I talked to Peggy Lee, and she said: "Al, it's not worth it. They fight you to the bitter end. I ended up getting $2 million, and the lawyers got all of it." I was very happy to settle out of court.

You were also the voice of Faversham, the toy maker, in The Great Mouse Detective. Any memories of working with Vincent Price?

Why, I didn't work with him! As a matter of fact, here we go again with an operation that's kind of confusing. I went in to audition for it, and I did all the lines, and left thinking it was a nice audition -- I'd never had a longer audition in my life. It went on and on! And they used that for the part in the picture! I wish I had known, I would've done it a little louder.  (Laugh.) It was quite amazing! So I never met anyone, it was just myself, working alone.

So, it was just an audition! Did they use any of your performance or body language when drawing the character?

They may have. There were a lot of artists there, and they may have been making sketches, which is the right way to do it. But I knew Vincent from other things we had worked on together.   In the late 50s, when we were all out of work, just playing guests spots wherever we could, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and myself were supporting a Western star, who will remain nameless, who was doing a real classic. He was very hot at the time, but he couldn't act! And we were all sitting there, watching him, and talking about what it was like to support somebody who was telling you what to do, but doesn't know what he's doing himself! But I figured I was in good company with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. If they have to play second fiddle, I figured it was fine to play third fiddle with that company. Peter Lorre gave me lessons in eye contact -- he was so marvelous, such a great performer. So, there I was, taking lessons from Peter Lorre and having marvelous conversations with Vincent Price... we had a great time.

I find it impossible to picture you, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre in the Old West.

Oh, it wasn't a Western! It was King Arthur's Court! It was a very funny court, with Vincent playing so grand, and me playing a sort of cockney villain. So, it was quite a mixture. Didn't go over too well, as I recall.

Are you happy doing the voice-over work now?

I love it. Love it. It's like going back to radio.

Do you miss radio?

No, I still do radio. I do two or three shows a month. It's called Focus on the Family. I do it for the fun of it, keeps your muscles working. It's like Carleton Morse's One Man's Family. It's a nice family program.

What are your future plans?

To keep on working! We're working on an Irish musical now, and it's going to take some time to get it in shape.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

No, just that people all the time ask me if I'm tired talking about Mr. Ed. I'm not. He was the greatest actor I ever supported in my life! He was also the only actor I ever rode, so I'm very grateful to him.  I learned to ride on Ed, and I learned to listen to him, and met some lovely Western people, basic American people, and it was great. Those memories will never leave.

An Evening With Celeste Holm

One month ago today we lost Celeste Holm (1917-2012), one of the few remaining figures from Hollywood’s Golden Age.  Of that august body, the only four survivors that come to mind are Olivia de Havillland (born 1916), Kirk Douglas (born 1916), Mickey Rooney (born 1920), and Shirley Temple (born 1928).  I’m sure it’s possible that, some 60 years hence, someone will write an appreciation of Ben Affleck while contemplating with nostalgia the Millennium Era of Hollywood, but I somehow doubt it.

It’s hard for people born into the era of movies like The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and yet another version of Spider-Man, to remember (or understand) that films were once made by, and for, adults.  (And, seriously, does our culture really need a “realistic” Batman movie?  Isn’t the very phrase fairly insulting?  Could you imagine anyone with a straight face 40 or 50 years ago suggesting that adult audiences would greet the notion of a “dark” superhero film with anything other than blank incomprehension or withering disdain?  And isn’t this stuff supposed to be fun, anyway?  Please don’t get me wrong – I enjoy a Batman film as next as the next fellow, and was entertained by both the 1960s comedy series and the Tim Burton films.  But … have we degenerated so as a culture that the story of a millionaire dressed like a giant bat so he could punch a homicidal clown is now considered worthy of an “adult” take?)  In such an atmosphere, it’s somehow consoling to remember that films were once made by adults and not a culture of arrested adolescents.

Holm was a staple on Broadway and film for decades.  She won an Academy Award for her performance in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), one of the first films to seriously address anti-Semitism, and was nominated for her performances in Come to the Stable (1949) and the classic All About Eve (1950).  On Broadway she originated the role of Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, and in 1991 I was lucky enough to see her as an aging actress in Paul Rudnick’s comedy about the ghost of John Barrymore, I Hate Hamlet. 

Holm had a very distinct screen persona.  Her somewhat plain, non-glamorous beauty hinted at an inner warmth, and her natural reserve suited her for roles as patrician or distant women.  Always more convincing as a socialite than a tart, Holm managed to bring an element of Yankee gentility to any endeavor.  To see two disparate sides of Holm, watch her nearly incandescent turn as a nun in Come to the Stable and then see her as chanteuse Flame O’Neill in the riotous comedy Champagne for Caesar (1950).  For a taste of her range, watch Holm cornered by the duplicitous Anne Baxter in All About Eve here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=987UWPKQVQA.

About 15 years ago I had the great pleasure to dine with Holm at the apartment of lyricist Fred Ebb  (1928-2004).  My friend, film scholar and writer Jim Nemeth, had “won” Holm for dinner at a charitable auction, and she regaled us for over four hours with stories alternately salty and scandalous.  For a woman so composed and serene onscreen, she could be quite surprising in the flesh.  (There is a reason it’s called “acting.”)  She spared nobody.

Asked about her Caesar co-star Vincent Price, Holm asked, “why would you want to know about him?  He couldn’t act.”  That was a comment not nearly as withering as her take on Stable costar Loretta Young, whom she called “a chocolate-covered black widow spider.”

About her Eve costars, she was equally brutal.  Hugh Marlowe was “dull,” and she had no comment on George Sanders, who she claimed only spoke to the director and never to the rest of the cast.  She called Baxter “ambitious,” and Bette Davis a word that rather rhymes with “ambitious.”

She had some genuinely nice things to say about her High Society (1956) co-star Frank Sinatra, but added, “you wouldn’t want to cross him.”  She dismissed Nicol Williamson (Barrymore in I Hate Hamlet) as a “drunk” and pronounced Julie Andrews (they worked together in television’s Cinderella) “cold.”  The biggest mistake of her career was not made by herself, but, rather, the producers of the film version of Oklahoma!, who did not ask her to reprise her stage role as Ado Annie.  Perhaps my favorite Holm-ism was her take on her fans:  “When someone tells me they like Gentlemen’s Agreement, I know they’re a West Side liberal.  When they mention Eve, I know they’re gay.”

It was, in short, an unforgettable evening.  Though I found the real Celeste Holm very different from the reel one, she was a woman who will be greatly missed.

Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It

William Shatner – idol of millions (billions?) of science fiction fans and would-be pitchmen – comes to Broadway in a one-man show, Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It.  To witness this spectacle among the true-believers is not quite the same as attending a straight play; rather, it has all the flavor of an old fashioned tent meeting.  Whatever one might say about the show, Shatner has more dedicated, demonstrative, supportive and clinically obese fans than any Broadway actor I have ever seen.

Before going into Shatner’s performance, we should make clear that this is not a “one man show” in the accepted sense.  Do not expect Vincent Price as Oscar Wilde or Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson; this is a personal appearance, where Shatner tells anecdotes detailing how famous he is and how much fun he has had at the expense of a doting public.  Celebrity confessional seems to be a new focus on Broadway – Carrie Fisher, another science fiction icon, made hay (and money) with a recent “one-woman show” where she detailed her problems of addiction and told some moldy Hollywood anecdotes.  However, I do find it specious to bill a fan event a “one-man show,” particularly when the actor involved does little other than natter about the past.

Even within that framework, though, Shatner’s World is slim pickings indeed.  In a mix of anecdotes and film clips, Shatner takes pot shots at past co-stars, talks about the glories of live television, and tells interesting stories about people as diverse of Christopher Plummer and Lon Chaney, Jr.  Some of these stories are interesting and amusing, but Shatner also tells too, too many borscht belt jokes that were stale when Eddie Cantor did them.  As an actor there is nothing that can be said of William Shatner that hasn’t been said of George Hamilton or Robert Wagner – men who are largely famous for having become famous. 

Shatner’s prowess as an actor is something we are expected to take on faith.  In detailing a triumphal turn as Shakespeare’s Henry V (when he understudied a sick Christopher Plummer), Shatner ends the story with showing us his press clip.  An actor, rather than a celebrity, would’ve provided a snippet of Henry (a part rich in monologs) for our delectation, but that’s never the point in Shatner’s World.  The point is he did it, by jingo, and now on to the next triumph…

One must, however, applaud Shatner for his robust energy and extreme vigor.  A man of 80, he prances up-and-down the stage for an hour and 40 minutes, sometimes shouting, sometimes whispering, and even dancing here and there.  He plays largely against an office chair, which doubles as everything from a car to a bed to a horse, and takes much-needed pauses during film clips.  As an act of endurance, it is a formidable feat for both the actor and the audience.

Shatner also tells a great many personal stories, including the death his third wife, and how using his prized horse as a stud ruined that animal, and his guilt at having to put it down.  Surprisingly, the horse story goes on for some 10 minutes, and his wife is largely mentioned in passing.  Even as a confessional, the show also lacks depth-of-feeling.

And if one were to sum-up Shatner -- the show and the man -- that would be the key complaint.  Many are engaged by Shatner’s innate hamminess and the fact that he happily embraces the joke that he has become.   But it is this lack of depth-of-feeling, this sense of a barren interior, that differentiates a fan icon from an actor of any real sensitivity or warmth.  Shatner has become the exemplar of our ego-centric age: we seem enamored of people who disproportionally love themselves.  I had the sense that the audience ovation was also self-reflective – by cheering Shatner, we applaud the neediest part of ourselves.  Shatner comes off as a strange mix of ego-maniacal manchild and wide-eyed innocent: that might be enough to fill the outer reaches of space during Prime Time, but not nearly enough to inhabit the even greater vastness that is the theater.

Part I -- Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.  – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I will break from tradition somewhat with this post, and insert an annoying autobiographical passage.

I started reading detective and gothic fiction of the Victorian era when I was a boy.  It was almost as if a world opened before me – a world of the mind and of the senses.

Armed with these twin passions, I also greatly enjoyed the pop culture transformations of them, including (or, perhaps, especially) the series of films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe starring Vincent Price.  I became a card-carrying Vincent Price devotee.

So, imagine my delight when, in 1979, Price came to New York to star in the Broadway production of John Gay’s Diversions and Delights.  Diversions is a one-man show that takes as its conceit Oscar Wilde lecturing a Parisian audience near the end of his life.  The Broadway run did not last long, but it rapidly moved off-Broadway, where it settled at the Roundabout Theater (then on West 23^rd Street) for an extended stay.

Diversions and Delights is a remarkable work.  Culled largely from Wilde’s own writings, it also incorporates bits of later-written biographies and much of Gay’s own keen dramatic sense.  I believe that only two plays about Wilde have really captured him to some extent: Diversions and Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

I initially went first to see Price, but returned again and again for Wilde.  I asked the management of the Roundabout if I could work as an usher at the theater in exchange for seeing the show every night, and I managed see Price as Wilde some 30-odd times.  It was a revelation to me.

Once the show was over, I immediately procured a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it became my golden book – I read it countless times after first buying it, so much so that passages of it are now forever locked in my memory.  It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with Oscar Wilde.

In Dorian Gray, Wilde writes of a book that poisoned Dorian – a heavily perfumed volume that opened to him wonderful sins disguised with incomparable beauty.  I was indeed luckier than Wilde’s fantastic hero – instead of being poisoned by a book, I was saved by one.  London during the Yellow Nineties and fin de siècle Europe became for me an alternate world where I lived another, perhaps more intense, life.  Just as Renaissance Italy became for Wilde and his mentor, Walter Pater, more of a state of mind than an historical period, the world of the aesthetes became a cornerstone of my philosophical compass.

Aside from the dramatic and fantastic events of Wilde’s life, I became deeply enamored of the philosophy of aestheticism, and looked too at others who explored the same creed.  I became interested in Walter Pater, John Ruskin, James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Théophile Gautier.

But more than aestheticism and a fascination with the Victorian era, I was deeply moved and beglamoured by Wilde himself.  And the thing that most fascinated me was that he was a figure at times fully-defined, and at others horrifyingly indistinct.  And that is because, I believe, that Wilde the man was too multiform and protean.  He embodied the Renaissance ideal of mastery of many types of mind and genius.  Even after reading Wilde for more than 30 years, I find it remarkable that the man who wrote the witty drawing-room comedy The Importance of Being Earnest is also the man who wrote the strangely musical, Symbolist Salome.  I have difficulty reconciling that the keen mind who deduced the possibility of Willie Hughes with the brain responsible for The Selfish Giant; and that the pen responsible for The Mind of Man Under Socialism is the same that wrote The Harlot’s House.  And is it possible that the bare, blunt and deeply affecting lines of The Ballad of Reading Goal could be written by the same man who wrote the perfumed and sensual Picture of Dorian Gray?

In the contemporary public mind, we have cut Wilde down to our own smaller-size.  We do not have the proper aspect ratio of the whole, multi-talented man.  We think of Wilde the Gay Martyr, or Wilde the Sensualist.  But these are only parts of the picture – if indeed they make up any significant proportion of the man at all.  To really know Wilde, we must know Wilde the gifted classics scholar and intellectual; Wilde the poet and Wilde the playwright; Wilde the novelist and Wilde the political thinker.  We have to consider Wilde’s upbringing and his deep appreciation of Irish folklore before knowing Wilde the fantasist.  We must know Hellenism and the works of Pater, Ruskin, Symonds and Mahaffy before we can fully understand Wilde the aesthete and dandy.  Aside from his success as a writer, the list of his accomplishments in so brief a life are immense, staggering: the finest talker and raconteur of his age, lecturer and arts advocate, moralist and social critic.  One of the most fascinating images in my mind’s eye is the thought of Oscar lecturing the denizens of the Old West about Cellini’s place in the history of art – it’s too delicious.  And to top it off, his was one of the most fascinating personalities of an age crammed with remarkable figures.  In his bravery and insouciance, his remarkable panache and élan, Wilde was also a swashbuckler without a sword, a courtier who became a type of personality unto himself.

Perhaps the only constant in Wilde’s life was his deep an abiding aestheticism; his passionate, deeply-ingrained and unending devotion to Art.  An appreciation of the arts (and the art of life) was encoded in Wilde’s DNA, it was impossible for him to engage in the world in any other way.  He saw his personal experience (both his joys and his tragedies) through the prism of art, and the world around him either reflected the canons of art, or fell disappointingly short.  There are many disparate facets of Wilde the man to explore, but if they are not seen through the green-tinted glasses of an aesthete, we do not see them as they really were.  It was the filter through which his protean intellect travelled, and the fundamental core of his philosophy and personal vision.

It is not impossible to believe that Wilde courted, to some degree, his own ruin and disgrace because it was the ending most dictated by satisfying dramaturgy.  That every epoch of his life, from his meteoric rise to his exile where he roamed Europe under the name Sebastian Melmoth, was in some way performance art, that he lived strictly for dramatic, aesthetic effect.

Tomorrow we finish our review of Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

And the Oscar Goes To….

Vincent Price as Oscar Wilde

For many of us, there is one author who seems to capture the essence of our innermost thoughts and philosophies; our daydreams and waking dreams are put down on paper and the secrets of our lives exposed to the reading world before we have actually lived them.

For me, the author with whom I’ve had the most affinity was Oscar Wilde, patron saint of this blog.  My intellectual and spiritual relationship with Wilde’s work is worthy of a detailed essay, but for today I wanted to discuss representations of Wilde himself, presented in other media.

Though Wilde has appeared as a character in several films, I never thought that any particular actor has captured the whole essence of the man.  Robert Morley played Wilde on stage, and later in the 1960 film Oscar Wilde, but his interpretation never seemed to me in any way organic.  Never for a moment could I sufficiently suspend disbelief that I was watching Wilde rather than an amusing and witty actor cast outside of his range. 

For while Morley was an actor of surprising range when he chose to exercise it, physically and emotionally he was all wrong for Wilde.  In addition, Morley’s film was based on a very popular (at the time) play Oscar Wilde by Leslie and Sewall Stokes, which sought to paint Wilde as something of a tragic martyr.  He was indeed that, to a degree, but this view is such a distortion of the whole picture of Wilde’s life as to ring false.  (It’s interesting to note that John Neville played Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s seducer and destroyer; Neville and Morley played brothers Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes in the otherwise forgettable Study in Terror.)

Closer to the mark, I think, was Peter Finch, who played Wilde in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, also in 1960.  The film itself is not particularly good, though James Mason is a standout as Edward Carson, the man who prosecuted Wilde.  Finch’s Wilde was closer to a three-dimensional human being than the caricature created by Morley could ever hope to be, and one wishes that the performance was surrounded by a better film. 

Nickolas Grace played Wilde in Ken Russell’s ornate, rather repulsive Salome’s Last Dance in 1988.  Those familiar with Russell’s oeuvre will either be simpatico to his approach, or not.  This film is not available on DVD (neither are Oscar Wilde or The Trials of Oscar Wilde), but it often plays in revival houses and is interesting for the Russell completist.

The most critically successful Wilde in movies has been Stephen Fry, who starred in the simply titled Wilde in 1997.  This film was a significant success, and helped launch the career of Jude Law, who played Lord Alfred Douglas.  It’s time that I admitted to the rather unpopular view that I thought Fry was not particularly good in the part, and that the film underwhelming.  (Law, on the other hand, is a powerhouse, and possibly delivered his best performance to date – his Douglas is beguiling, dangerous and utterly crackers.)

Fry, director Brian Gilbert and screenwriter Julian Mitchell work so hard to make Wilde a tragedy that, they too, make the same error as Robert Morley: the tragic Wilde is not the complete picture, and is a distortion of the very essence of the man.  For despite how ornate or perfumed his character and outlandish and eccentric his behavior, Wilde was also the supreme comedian of his age.  Any motion picture of Wilde is fundamentally untrue unless it is also, to some degree, wickedly funny.  Wilde the martyr is free of comedy – but Wilde the comedian who became a martyr is a complex and more interesting figure.

Not surprisingly, Wilde is most effectively portrayed onstage, where audiences seem more comfortable with this paradox than in our movie houses.  Moisés Kaufman’s masterful Gross Indecency creates for us a Wilde who is archly funny and profoundly tragic.

Perhaps the finest representation of Wilde was in John Gay’s one-man play, Diversions and Delights, which starred Vincent Price on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in 1978, and later, off-Broadway, at the Roundabout Theater.  The conceit of the play is Wilde, near the end of his life and living under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, gave a lecture in Paris telling the story of his life.

It would be nearly impossible to imagine a more serendipitous collusion of actor and part than Vincent Price and Oscar Wilde.  Both were great champions of the arts, both men of deep erudition and each possessed a natural and delicious wit.  I was lucky enough see Price in Diversions and Delights at the Roundabout nearly every night of its run, and now whenever I think of Wilde, on one level or another I imagine Price.  It is, to date, the definitive performance of Wilde.

Happily, Gay’s Diversions and Delights is about to be revived by the Ensemble Theater Company under Kevin Shinnick.  We caught up with Mr. Shinnick last week to get an over of his plans for Diversions and Delights, and his vision of the fledgling Ensemble Theater Company.

Tell us about the Ensemble Theater Company

Well, Craig Dudley and came this close about two years back to getting a production of Diversions and Delights off the ground Off Broadway , so we decided we would now try and form a new nonprofit Professional Off Broadway Equity Approved Company.  Diversions and Delights will be our first production.

What are the company goals?

We want to offer hands-on experience and support to the next generation of theatre artists and audiences, and to produce quality, intelligent theatre that will engage, inspire, entertain and challenge with forgotten or retired theatrical productions; and to celebrate the essential power of the theatre and an ensemble cast to illuminate our common humanity.

We also want to provide opportunities to actors and others interested in pursuing a career in the theatre industry by offering them a chance to learn from seasoned mentors and give them exposure to talent, situations and experiences that they might not otherwise have in their current educational situations.  Though it’s probably best to remember something Wilde said at this point:  “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught!” - Oscar Wilde

Will you have a stock company of actors?

We will have company members but the ideal is to bring new talent both off and on stage , and let them work with those who are professionals and get them seen . Plus we want to provide talented professionals having difficulty getting seen to show their talent to others…

Why did you choose Diversions and Delights as your inaugural show?

Frankly, it is a show I fell in love with back in 1978 when I sat front row center and watched Vincent Price become the legendary wit and playwright.  

The play is currently unpublished (though trying to find a company smart enough to pick it up), so we were fortunate enough to speak to the very generous and talented author, John Gay. 

What is it about Oscar Wilde that continues to make him relevant and compelling in the 21st Century?

In an age of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell ,gay marriage, gay rights, as well as civil liberties being trod upon , free speech and free press  being stifled (there are protesters being stomped on at Wall Street as I make this reply ,whose protest went on for almost two weeks before the press in general began to cover it) and the general dumbing down of the general populace.

We feel that people want to see entertainment that also stimulates their mind, and has something to say on the human condition .  Another show we are looking at is a piece I directed 10 years ago called The Crimson Thread, which deals with women's issues, as well as unions, in a brilliant funny and touching fashion . 

What’s is like working with the playwright on this production.  What is his involvement?

We contacted him directly and he could not be nicer.  The play has been done rarely since the 1978 tour, so we hope our production will bring attention to this funny and touching piece.

Right now, we are trying to raise funds for the theatre company. If anyone wants to make a donation they can go to http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=4274. Donations from $5 to $5000 can be made via credit card through Fractured Atlas, and are tax deductible. 

Also, on November 18th, Sentimental Journey is performing at the TRIAD in NYC. Parts of the proceeds will go to benefit TETCNY's fundraiser campaign. You can learn more here at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=270582946306137.  Also, people can visit our Web page at www.tetcny.org. 

We’re looking for new members and contributors, as well as a Director of Development and a Web Site Designer.  Anyone interested can contact me through the Web site.

Thank you, Kevin!

There is No Cure for Dr. Haggard’s Disease

To celebrate Vincent Price’s 100^th birthday, I thought it appropriate to look at my favorite contemporary Gothic novel, Dr. Haggard’s Disease, by Patrick McGrath (1993).  It may be the finest Gothic of the last century and will be long remembered.

Briefly: Dr. Haggard lives in grand romantic seclusion at his sea cliff home. Limping and racked with pain, he takes drugs to forget his hip injury and to bury the tormenting memory of the woman he loved, Fanny, now dead.

Fanny returns to him in a way when her son, Jimmy, comes to his home. The men build a friendship with a highly charged sexual undercurrent. While remembering the dead Fanny’s passion, Haggard sees changes in her son and comes to believe that Jimmy is somehow morphing into her, that Fanny is coming out of the past to return to him. But is Jimmy really changing...?

The title is something of a joke -- passion is Haggard’s disease. We never really know if Jimmy is turning into his mother, or if the change exists only in Haggard’s drug-tormented mind.  The novel’s end is one that you will not forget quickly.

Dr. Haggard’s Disease is a textbook of the form. It captures not only the Gothic sensibility, but its mood, its sense of place, its sexual energy, its emotional tenor and melancholy, its obsession with the past; and, as a story, it is a model of construction. 

Haggard’s obsessive love of Fanny hints strongly of necrophilia and the Doctor, addicted to drugs, is not always a reliable narrator.  Haggard is a man of science destroyed by monomania, a slavish devotion to a feminine ideal.  And, like the vengeful lamias found in Poe’s Liegia and Berenice, Fanny’s strength and passion reaches from beyond the grave to affect the men who live in the shadow of her memory.

Author Patrick McGrath (born 1950 in London) is the author of only a handful of novels.  His grimly comic The Grotesque (1989) is a fascinating hybrid, a comedy of manners with an Edgar Allen Poe sensibility.  Spider (1990), another tale of insanity, is a fine novel, but Asylum (1996) seems curiously bloodless to me.  McGrath may not be prolific, but he is masterful.

With Dr. Haggard’s Disease McGrath rescued the Gothic from its kitschy confines. This richly textured novel transcends what the Gothic has become, and returns this great tradition back to the realm of serious literature.

It may be in time that McGrath is ranked along Poe, Stevenson, Doyle, Stoker and Shelly as one of the great Gothic novelists -- an author whose work transcends genre to become literature. McGrath writes with a passion and intensity worthy of his own Dr. Haggard, and this is a rich book to savor, to be read and re-read.

Arts Advocates

Vincent Price

At one time, there was a distinct breed of celebrity who harnessed their popular appeal to engage in arts advocacy.  They were ubiquitous, and it was almost impossible to tune into radio or television without the likes of Vincent Price or Tony Randall or Kitty Carlisle touting an appreciation of Fine Arts.   Though many today may find this type of advocacy silly or hopelessly ‘middle brow,’ these champions of the arts, and others like them, were an important stepping stone for many into a deeper, more fulfilling world.  The accomplishments of figures like Price, Randall and Carlisle are not to be underestimated. 

Kitty Carlisle (1910-2007) was primarily an actress.  Movie buffs remember her turn in A Night at the Opera (1935) with the Marx Brothers, but she was also a staple on television, regularly appearing on such quiz shows as To Tell The Truth.  (She was also married to producer/playwright Moss Hart.)  Once her acting career slowed down, Carlisle worked for over 20 years as member and later chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts.  Carlisle’s greatest role was as a highly-visible advocate of the arts, lobbying the New York State Legislature and the United States Congress for funding. She crisscrossed the state to support rural string quartets, small theater groups and inner-city dance troupes.

In this role, Carlisle saw herself as a “Johnny Appleseed for culture,” especially in rural parts of New York State. “Wherever we go, the arts flourish,” she said. “It’s a cliché now that people say they want to make a difference, but I’d like to think that I somehow made a difference.”

Tony Randall (1920-2004), of course, is familiar around the world as fussbudget Felix Unger on television’s The Odd Couple (1970-1975).  But Randall was also a tireless advocate on behalf of opera, ballet, and in support of the American National Actors Theater.

Like many actors of his generation, Randall started on radio (he played Reggie York, the English detective on I Love a Mystery), but soon found supporting and starring roles in a string of now-classic 1950s film comedies, such as Pillow Talk (1959).  He transitioned easily into television, supporting Wally Cox on Mr. Peepers (1952-1955) before starring in three different television series of his own.

Randall’s devotion to the arts was broad and engaging.  He hosted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s concerts in Central Park, sang in a Metropolitan Opera production of Die Fledermaus, and in 1991, he founded the National Actors Theater, floating the project with millions of dollars of his own money because he fervently believed that the United States needed its own national theater.  He was chairman of the National Actors Theater until his death in 2004.

Few celebrities were more beloved than actor Vincent Price (1911-1993).  Star of films, television, quiz show staple and TV pitchman, Price worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Alice Cooper, and appeared in everything from the film classic Laura (1944) to The Brady Bunch.  On stage, Price spent several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s starring in Diversions and Delights, a one-man show by John Gay about Oscar Wilde, patron saint of this blog.  It is considered by many to be Price’s finest performance.

But Price was more than an actor; he was an avid devotee of the arts.  He was a noted collector, with a taste for paintings, Early American crafts and jade pieces.  He toured schools regularly, preaching the gospel of art, and offered his expertise to a variety of public projects.

Price donated some 90 pieces from his collection to the East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California, to establish America’s first teaching art collection in 1951. Today, the Vincent Price Art Gallery continues to present world-class exhibitions, and remains one of Price’s enduring legacies. The collection contains over 2,000 pieces and has been valued in excess of $5 million.

Price also worked to bring art to the people.  In 1962, Sears stores believed that, outside of major cities, fine art was not available (or affordable) to the general public.  The store approached Vincent Price to lead the program to change that. Sears selected Price not only for his fame, but also for his reputation in the international art world as a collector, lecturer, former gallery-owner and connoisseur who studied art at Yale and the University of London.

Sears gave Price complete authority to select the works for this daring initiative.  He canvassed the world for fine art to offer through Sears.  He bought collections, commissioned artists (including Dali) and applied his own innate sense of taste and quality.

The project was a great success.  The first show opened in Denver, Colorado, and included original works by the great masters, including Whistler, Rembrandt and Chagall.  Items ranged in price from $10 to $3,000, putting them within the reach of all Americans.  (Many of these pieces are still available, sometimes on EBay, with the legend The Vincent Price Collection stamped on the back.) 

In 1966, the Sears Vincent Price Gallery of Fine Art opened in Chicago, Illinois, featuring the works of talented, but lesser-known artists at affordable prices.  Price was involved with Sears until 1971, and was responsible for more than 50,000 pieces of fine art finding a way into American homes.

And who today has taken the place of Kitty Carlisle, Tony Randall and Vincent Price?  The public intellectual has not yet completely faded from the scene (one thinks of Harold Bloom or Christopher Hitchens), but the Arts Advocate is rare indeed.  Are celebrities leery of aligning themselves to an artistic cause due to possible charges of ‘elitism?’  Or are the Fine Arts now too alienating to the public-at-large?

It is time that some of our more public figures became advocates for the arts.  The cultural losses we could sustain without that passion and dedication are too terrible to contemplate.