Remembering Laura . . . and those who dreamed her into being

Last month I spent an enchanted evening with Vincent Price . . . also Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews. Yes, it was a screening of Laura (cue David Raksin’s evocative theme music). It was held in the perfect venue: the American Cinematheque’s flagstaff theatre, the Egyptian, which has graced Hollywood Boulevard for 90 years. The Egyptian, opulent and Hollywood-exotic, was once the site of America’s first movie premiere. Now it’s a gathering spot for movie lovers catching up on world cinema classics. From April 5 through 21, the Egyptian will host the fifteenth annual Noir City festival. Laura (from 1944) qualifies as film noir too, but the special showing in February coincided with a visit to L.A. of Carl Rollyson, author of the first biography of Dana Andrews, Hollywood Enigma. Also present was Andrews’ daughter Susan, along with many of the film’s biggest fans. One admitted that her parents had named her after Gene Tierney’s character, a mysterious lady who may or may not have been a murder victim.

The invaluable Alan K. Rode, my expert on all things noir, provides the backstory for Laura, which began as a popular novel. According to Alan, who has kindly let me quote him at length, “[Rouben] Mamoulian started out as the director and [Otto] Preminger was the producer. Preminger and Darryl F. Zanuck [of Twentieth Century-Fox] had a major falling-out over Kidnapped in 1938 that resulted in Otto being blackballed in Hollywood for a number of years. Zanuck kept him under contract but didn't let him do anything at the studio as payback. 

“Preminger was earning his way into DFZ's good graces because he was ‘allowed’ to produce Laura. Preminger wanted to direct the film, but Zanuck didn't want him, so Otto as a producer was put in the unfortunate position of having to find a director for a film that he knew he was born to direct.

“Mamoulian was overbearing and egotistical (just like Otto) and started rewriting the script . . . [Mamoulian] cast Fox contract player Laird Cregar as Waldo, a terrible decision that Preminger lobbied Zanuck to change. Zanuck wouldn't budge, so Preminger risked his nascent career to hire Clifton Webb and then convinced Zanuck to schedule a screen test. Zanuck, who loathed homosexuals, was afraid that Webb ‘would fly,’ i.e appear overtly gay on screen. . . . [But] Webb was perfect as the upper-crust dandy, and Zanuck -- who was as honest as any mogul about what was right for a film -- approved his hiring as Waldo with alacrity.

“Mamoulian pouted, misdirected the cast, and did his best to ruin the movie. Zanuck got fed up and, in a conference with Preminger, fired Mamoulian and told Preminger to direct Laura. Preminger . . . hired Joe La Shelle as the cinematographer, got a new portrait of Laura for the movie [to replace one that had been painted by Mamoulian’s wife] and made a classic film. As Vincent Price related, ‘Otto had an idea about the material and he was right. The New York society depicted in the film are all darlings, sweet and charming and clever and bright -- on the surface. But underneath they're evil. And Otto understood this in a way Mamoulian didn't.’”

Alan also supplied a postscript about Mamoulian’s career going downhill after Laura. He doesn’t think much of Mamoulian as a film director. Yet Mamoulian also helmed some landmark stage and screen productions. In the 1980s I spent a fascinating afternoon with him (in a house overrun by cats) . . . but that’s a subject for another day.

The Immortal Vincent Price

Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times carried on the front page of its arts section two different stories that connect with the legacy of Vincent Price. One Times critic reviewed a local performance of The Fall of the House of Usher. This obscure 1987 chamber opera by Philip Glass has at its center a character most of us associate with Price from Roger Corman’s 1960 film. The second article described a contemporary art exhibit, the MexiCali Biennial, housed at East L.A. College’s Vincent Price Art Museum. The show’s Latin-American artists had chosen -- of all things -- cannibalism as a dominant motif, and Christopher Knight of the Times found that fact quite apt, “given the venue, which is named for an erudite actor who was both Yale-trained in art history and popular for ghoulish turns in horror movies.”

Later on Tuesday, during a game of Trivial Pursuit, I had to answer the question, “Who supplied the spooky voice at the end of Michael Jackson’s Thriller?” (Remember? “Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is now at hand . . .” ) Who else but Vincent Price?

The eerie coincidence made me realize the extent to which Price, who left us back in 1993, is still around. He’s even in my recipe box. Among his many other talents, Price was a gourmet chef, who published (along with his then-wife Mary) a cookbook that many still treasure. I don’t own the book, but I do have –- typed out on two faded index cards –- his complicated recipe for Caesar salad, complete with anchovies, coddled egg, and homemade croutons. Yum!

A version of Vincent Price also surfaces in a novel, first published in 1971, that was reissued in paperback in 2011. The Late Great Creature, a National Book Award finalist, is a bizarre and inventive tale of a world-famous actor filming a macabre screen version of Poe’s “The Raven.” Author Brock Brower makes clear that the central character is a wholly original creation, neither Karloff nor Lorre nor Lugosi. And his screen version of “The Raven” is hardly the goofy, spoofy one that Corman had filmed in 1963. But Brower did tell me, when I tracked him down in Santa Barbara, that much of his inspiration came from the time he spent, during a Hollywood layover, hanging around Corman’s film set. And his novel does contain a character named Quincy Adams who is meant as an affectionate portrait of Vincent Price.

Brower’s Quincy/Vincent is both brilliant and emphatically effeminate. Longstanding questions about Vincent Price’s sexuality are complicated by daughter Victoria’s writings about her famous dad. Her article, “Vincent/Victoria,” published in 1999 in The Advocate, hints that his preferences were, at the very least, complicated.

I take no sides in this debate, but would rather remember Price as a man of talent and class. When he died twenty years ago, I helped Roger Corman gather his thoughts into a press release that we titled “Vincent Price as I Remember Him.” In eulogizing the star of nine of his best-known features, Corman praised Price’s consummate professionalism. Roger pointed especially to The Raven, in which Price successfully adjusted to three different acting styles, that of the young Jack Nicholson (trained in the Method), Boris Karloff (classically schooled in the English manner), and Peter Lorre, who “did anything that came into his mind at any given moment.”

I also continue to cherish what Price told one interviewer: “I sometimes feel that I’m impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick but I love it.”

For Craig Edwards’ tribute to his favorite actor, see his “A Price Far Above Rubies.”

Heather Presley just shared with me a great family story about Vincent Price. It seems Price signed the wall of her mother's close friend. No, we're not talking about Facebook. The friend owned an art gallery in Marion, Illinois. Upon entering, Price pulled out a marker and dramatically signed his name near the store entrance. What panache! What chutzpah!