We stare in horror at their once beautiful, now disfigured-by-fear faces, gloating in their torment, overdosing on schadenfreude as we watch them being subjugated, tortured and abused. We dine out on their disgrace, and get off on their shame. They are the screaming queens of cinema, glittering stars of yesteryear who descend into the nightmare world of sleazy horror flicks. We see them scampering about in torn negligees, or bloody one-size-fits-all kaftans, exulting in their strange zaftig glamour, as we gaze in dismay at their awkward cries of distress.

We see the first vague inklings of this genre of fright flicks in classics such as Sudden Fear (1952), starring a neurotic Joan Crawford taken in by a duplicitous Jack Palance, and Sunset Boulevard, when aging screen siren Norma Desmond (played to perfection by aging screen siren Gloria Swanson) seduces screenwriter William Holden and loses her mind at the same time.

For me the genre really began with Kind Lady (1951), a late noir thriller starring dowager Ethel Barrymore as a rich art collector besieged by ruthless con artists, including a delectably evil Angela Lansbury. Held hostage in her lavish home, Barrymore exudes acres of angst and rubs her hands raw from fretting hysterically. But the real fear is in her voice and her facial expressions. It’s a tour-de-force performance from a legendary actress who only got better with age.

Some grande dame heroines, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, are alchemists who manage to spin gold out of their tarnished downward spirals. Others, like Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Olivia’s insanely jealous sister, Joan Fontaine, wallow in their misery, causing us to shield our eyes from their scarifying decline. Others, like tough girls Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck, straighten their shoulders against misfortune and battle all kinds of devils, but it’s their inner demons we linger on, the turmoil that led them to this disarming fall from grace.

The first time I ever saw Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, I must have been a kid. For me she was that character. I had no idea that Bette Davis had had a stellar career in Hollywood for decades prior to that film. Of course, I was too young to understand that the movie was about Hollywood and how it curses its favorite creatures. For me it was simply a scary movie about a crazy lady who tortures her sister by feeding her dead rats. I remember when I did see one of her early pictures, Jezebel, on the afternoon movie. I could not believe it was the same person. Bette Davis was never more beautiful than she was in that film. I simply couldn’t reconcile the two sides of her career: the glamour puss and the garish ghoul. But Bette Davis could, and so could Hollywood. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for her hellbent Baby Jane.

Her co-star Joan Crawford experienced her own thrill of schadenfreude when she waltzed past Davis at the awards ceremony to give the prize to Anne Bancroft. The fact that the two had an on-going legendary feud only added spice to their appearing in the same film. Audiences relished seeing the two of them go at it. While Bette Davis may have won more accolades for her wildly grotesque tour-de-force acting, Joan held her own as the disabled Blanche, and allegedly got her revenge by padding her bosom during the film’s finale when she died on the beach. She stole the scene without having to say a word. Joan excelled in many horror films, most notably Strait-Jacket and Berserk, two of the campiest and slickest splatter fests of the 60s. She had no shame. That much is obvious when watching her wardrobe tests (now available on You Tube.) She relished the chance to get trashy and demented.

One suspects when seeing her in less successful schlock shockers such as I Saw What You Did and Trog that she did it merely for the thrill of working again, of being in front of the camera. One of her finest hours is the first episode of Night Gallery (Rod Serling’s less successful successor to The Twilight Zone) in which she played a rich blind woman who will stop at nothing to see again, paying a man a fortune in exchange for his eyes. The twist is that she will only be able to see for a short time, at night, and New York is about to experience a prolonged blackout. Spielberg directed the episode. His first job, I think. But it’s Joan’s show all the way.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, we were inundated with other examples of the genre. Tallulah’s Die, Die My Darling (also known as Fanatic) is the ultimate camp classic. Playing against type as a religious zealot, Bankhead is preposterously ugly. Her voice is a lethal weapon. It’s hard to believe she once dazzled London and New York on the stage, or ever caused Alfred Hitchcock to blush when filming Lifeboat. Darling has its flaws, no question (Donald Sutherland is insufferable in it.) But who can stop watching it once it starts? Tallulah Bankhead gives a mesmerizing performance. Her last film, as it turned out, since she died three years later after tackling the Black Widow on Batman.

The same thing happened to Miriam Hopkins, another of the old school Hollywood gals, and one of Bette’s favorite betes noires. Some may find her comeback role in the 1961 remake of The Children’s Hour (she had starred in the original film version of Hellman’s play, These Three (1936)) pretty frightening. It was hard to see any vestiges of the colorful beauty who had played Becky Sharp in 1935. But it’s her final film The Savage Intruder (1970) that earned her entrée into the pantheon of fagged hags. She plays an aging actress, an invalid in a wheelchair in her Hollywood home, beset upon by a bizarre retinue of scoundrels.

Ida Lupino was another Bette Davis rival, although mostly in the eyes of the studio heads. Audiences loved her for her unique talents. Unlike her sisters in the Hollywood factory, Lupino was her own woman. She not only acted but directed. She had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. But even Ida couldn’t resist the thrall of cheap thrills. She starred, alongside an enigmatic Ernest Borgnine, in the now classic The Devil’s Rain, 1975, about a coven of Satanists with extraordinary powers to melt their victims. The final relentless sequence is among the most ghoulish and hilariously horrible endings of all.

Those gay sisters Olivia and Joan, of course, are no strangers to the genre. Joan proved she could play the victim beautifully in Rebecca, falling prey to Judith Anderson’s evil schemes. Dame Judith went on to make a few bad movies herself, including the uninviting Inn of the Damned (1975). But it was at the end of Joan Fontaine’s career that she truly was victimized. In The Witches (1966), she is manhandled by a coven of devil worshipers led by another British dame, Kay Walsh. Say what you will about Miss Fontaine, but Joan always gave good gasp. Seeing her flee from a devil doll in her nightgown (several years before Karen Black did the same in Trilogy of Terror) is better than any Victoria’s Secret video.

Olivia always took chances in her career, being one of the first to challenge the unfair studio system. So it was no surprise when she stepped into The Snake Pit in 1948. Seeing the usually dignified de Havilland pulling her hair out in a madhouse was shocking stuff back then, but she went on to star in the even more shocking Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte opposite Bette Davis in 1964. Olivia didn’t sport any ghoulish makeup but her character bore an evil mask. Joan Crawford was slated to play the part, but backed out at the last minute. De Havilland makes it her own, however and gives the movie some much-needed class. Agnes Moorehead, who would go on to make a trashy horror film herself (Dear Dead Delilah, 1974), seems to think she’s in an Outer Limits episode as she tears up the screen in a blazingly de trop performance.

De Havilland lost her haughty glamour in the TV movie The Screaming Woman (1972), above, and graced the smarmy The Swarm in 1978, where the biggest threat to her beehive hairdo were killer bees from Africa.

Olivia did star in one of my all-time favorite thrillers, Lady in a Cage (1964), co-starring a young James Caan. Its creepy opening credits, with a black girl on roller skates kicking a bum, over a frenetic jazz score set the tone for a feverish fright flick that broke new ground in psychological suspense. Olivia looks as beautiful as ever, but she plays an invalid, reliant on her elevator and a suicidal gay son, who is besieged by a gang of psychotic hoodlums. Caan is evil incarnate, as he terrorizes her in his tight white jeans, exposing his hairy chest.

Katharine Hepburn had her own star turn in an elevator five years earlier in Suddenly Last Summer. Although Tennessee Williams’ play was not intended as horror, the Manckiewicz film seems to take its cues from the campy Drive-In horror pics of the 50s. Hepburn makes her first appearance descending in a stylized gilded cage, part of a bizarre avian theme underscored by her fondness for exotic plumes and hothouse plants. The shocking finale, in which we see Elizabeth Taylor lose it as she watches her husband get eaten alive by vengeful waifs (a Freudian sparagmos about the evils of fellatio?) was too funny to be frightening. No, the real horror in this flick is watching Montgomery Clift’s creepy, wooden performance, his face like a disfigured Cigar-store Indian’s, following his near fatal car accident.

Elizabeth Taylor, it is said, was nearby when that awful crash took place. She ran to Monty’s side. In some of her later films we see her running. It’s as if she wanted us to see her suffer. Why else would she choose to star in Night Watch, a stylish thriller from 1973 that paired her with her former co-star in Butterfield 8, Laurence Harvey. It’s one of her “lost pictures,” along with X,Y and Zee, The Blue Bird, and Hammersmith Is Out. (Thanks to You Tube and the internet, many of these previously obscure films are now readily accessible.) While nothing more than a new take on Gaslight, with a twist, Night Watch is highly effective and deserves acclaim if only for Taylor’s wardrobe, which includes several larger-than-life kaftans and form-fitting period pants-suits. Plus her purring paranoia is deliciously deceptive.

I wish I could say the same for performances by Lana Turner in such high camp as The Big Cube (a 1969 psychedelic LSD trip) and Persecution (1974) but they can’t hold a candle to her earlier work in haute trash like Portrait in Black and Madame X. Watching Lana Turner emote in The Witches’ Brew (1980) one feels like Johnny Stompanato, with a knife in one’s back.

The real queen of the screamers is Shelley Winters. During the 60s, she made two films in the aging spinster vein. The first The Mad Room (1969) has her playing a loony widow kept cooped up by a psychotic Stella Stevens. The next year she played Ma Barker in Bloody Mama, one of Roger Corman’s cheesy splatter flicks. In 1971 she went berserk again as a demented widow in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (a true rip-off of the Bette Davis canon). This time the distinguished actor Ralph Richardson co-starred. That same year she unreeled another “questionable” film, What’s the Matter with Helen? opposite a game Debbie Reynolds, below. You’d think that would have been sufficient, but she went on to make Poor Pretty Eddie (aka Redneck County Rape), Journey Into Fear, and Tentacles.

Gloria Grahame, Helen Hayes, Joan Bennett, Simone Signoret, Ruth Roman, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth all descended into the pit, filming chiller thrillers that defied easy categorization. Veronica Lake, of the lovely locks, combed the depths by slumming in the less-than-appetizing Flesh Feast. The great Ann Sothern, who had warmed the cockles of our hearts as Maisie, suddenly reappeared as a smothering mother of a gang-rape murderer (the aptly named John Savage) in the slasher The Killing Kind (1973).

The Baby Jane craze continued with a film starring Geraldine Page, who almost didn’t need to join in the fun as most of her onscreen performances were already pretty bizarre. But in 1969 she appeared in a frightful little film called What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? alongside Ruth Gordon, another actress who always seemed a bit off-kilter.

These cinematic excursions into the macabre don’t have to be strictly schlock fests. The Fan in 1981 gave us Bogart’s babe, Lauren Bacall, in a stylish slasher film co-starring Michael Biehn. It was the first time the killer was prettier than his prey. The film boasts several frightening sequences, although the scariest moment was a close-up of Bacall’s eyes.

The screaming queen frenzy sort of died out when Betsy Palmer appeared as the psycho killer in Friday The 13th. Sure there have been countless horror movies with big name stars since then, but the thrill is gone, the key guignol glamour is missing. Perhaps the novelty got washed away by too much blood and gore. I wouldn’t mind, however, seeing Meryl Streep or Debra Winger take a stab at the genre.

I had no idea when I started delving into this subject that it has such a devoted following. In fact, I thought I had coined the term “Hollywood Guignol,” but I see that a new book has just been published by McFarland Press entitled Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother, by Peter Shelley.

The $45 cover price is enough to make you scream.

(Friends and fans of this blog may be surprised to find the focus of this week’s entry the frightening freaks and famous monsters of filmdom. But Halloween is fast approaching and I suddenly remembered that I had written the following chapter — “Monster Madness” — for a book entitled The Variety History of Show Business that Abrams published in 1993. My contribution explored the cinematic influence of two great horror films: Dracula and Frankenstein. The piece is a revelation to me since I honestly forgot that I had known all this stuff!

A few nights ago, in a similarly morbid train of thought, I also happened to be watching a tribute to slasher films on one of the more gruesome cable channels and there was a fascinating interview with Tom Savini. Like a blow to the head, I quickly recalled that I had worked on a documentary about this great makeup artist (Friday the 13th; Maniac; Dawn of the Dead) for Paramount Home Video. The memory of it was buried deep within my resume. I was credited as the author of the “script” for the film (released originally only on video). It was the first in a series of Scream Greats projects that Paramount hoped to put out. I think they only did two in the end. My job as “script” writer was to piece together the filmed interviews and movie moments from Tom Savini’s oeuvre.

I worked with the young and extremely likable director Damon Santostefano who has gone on to direct full-length Hollywood features. What a bloodbath of memories all of this brings back! My brother Ken can attest to my early childhood interest in old horror films. I used to collect Eerie and Creepy magazines as well as Famous Monsters of Filmland. And I had all the Frankenstein and Dracula toys one could find back in the 60s. Somehow in the 80s, I lost interest in horror films. I never warmed up to the Wes Craven school of fright films in which nubile blonds are massacred by malignant sadists. What appeals to me about the early horror classics is the pathos associated with the “monsters.” Both Dracula and Frankenstein were sympathetic in their own misunderstood, tragic, ways. Here, below, is the essay as it appeared in Variety’s anthology.)

Monster Madness

In darkened movie theatres across the country on the auspicious date of Friday the 13th, February 1931, audiences shivered in their seats as they watched an eerie new “talking film” called Dracula, starring a little known actor with the vaguely sinister name Bela Lugosi. Advance word had alerted audiences to the film’s weird and terrifying premise: the tale of a vampire who escapes the inevitability of death by sucking the blood of beautiful young women. Advertised as “the Strangest Love Story of All” (to capitalize on its Valentine’s Day weekend opening), the film was shot in a stark monochrome and filled with ghoulish images of cobweb-strewn castles and foggy crypts. Nurses were stationed in some theatres to be on hand should any of the patrons faint in terror.

Near the end of the picture, the character of Dr. Van Helsing took out a crucifix and held it up to the evil vampire, who flung his cloak over his face to avoid the powerful force generated by the Christian symbol. At the initial showing at the Roxy Theatre in New York, the audience suddenly burst into loud applause, cheering on the doctor as Good triumphed over Evil. Much to everyone’s surprise, Universal Pictures, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy, had a huge hit on its hands. The film broke movie house records, becoming the number one box office draw of the year.

Today, it is hard to image the effect that Dracula had on the moviegoing public of 1931. The film’s special effects seem gimmicky and unconvincing. Lugosi’s ham acting seems ludicrous even by the standards of the early talkies, and the tortured script leaves a lot of plot twists unresolved. But American audiences, struggling through the severest depression the country had ever experienced, had never seen anything like it before and were entranced by its mysterious glamour and gruesome mood. Lugosi’s portrait of a decadent European aristocrat who rises from his casket every night to prey on virtuous young women struck a chord with viewers who had survived a stock market crash and were coming to grips with the after-effects of massive waves of immigration.

Eschewing fangs and elegantly attired in white tie and tails, Lugosi made Count Dracula almost human, acting more like one of those charming Continental playboys who haunted gambling casinos than a devilish fiend with a thirst for blood. Instead of being repugnant, Lugosi made vampires chic. The director, Tod Browning, used expressionistic cinematographic techniques then popular in Germany — skewed camera angles, black and white contrasts, shadows and fog — to great effect, transforming Dracula’s castle into a Poe-like realm of perverse beauty.

When Mordaunt Hall, the New York Times film reviewer, wrote that Browning’s picture “succeeds in its Grand Guignol intentions,” he could only describe the film as a “mystery,” since the term “horror film” had not yet been invented. True, in silent films, John Barrymore had succeeded in capturing the horrific essence of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), and the legendary Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces,” had made a series of scary pictures — The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and London After Midnight (1927), in which he played a policeman masquerading as a vampire (Chaney had in fact been offered the part of Dracula, but he died before the film went into production). But Dracula was the first Hollywood picture especially designed to frighten and shock audiences by making the monster himself the focus of dramatic interest. As a result, a cult of personality developed around the Count Dracula character. Lugosi received mountains of fan mail in care of Universal and became so identified as the personification of evil that Disney’s animators used his face as the devil in Fantasia.

Universal capitalized on the public’s newfound fascination with the grotesque by rushing into production a film version of Mary Shelley’s classic 19th-century novel Frankenstein. The studio had owned the film rights (of a play version by Peggy Webling) for 12 years but had feared to produce it because of its grim subject matter. The surprise success of Dracula, however, suddenly made it possible. The story of a mad scientist who creates a monster from severed parts of cadavers had been filmed twice before — first in 1910 by Thomas Edison (the film, unfortunately, is lost) and again in 1915 as Life Without Soul — but this new talking version, a mere 70 minutes long) writen by John Balderston (who penned the popular Broadway play on which Dracula was based) was going to be different. Smelling a hit, Universal pulled out all the stops. Bette Davis and Leslie Howard were slated to star, with Lugosi playing the monster, but the studio had second thoughts, realizing that Davis was destined for greatness in more dramatic roles. When British director Jame Whale was signed on, he chose Colin Clive and Mae Clarke. Lugosi, fresh from his success as the count, refused to play a nonspeaking role, so Whale opted for a relatively unknown British actor who went by the name of Boris Karloff. The rest, as they say in B movies, is history.

Opening at the start of the Christmas season in December 1931, and released in a print tinted a ghoulish green which made the monster look more like a walking corpse, Frankenstein proved to be an even bigger smash than Dracula, mostly because of Karloff’s riveting performance. Listed only as “?” in the opening credits, he imbued the creature with a tremendous sense of pathos and a mime-like intensity. Karloff was aided by Jack Pierce’s inventive makeup (he examined cadavers to get the right effect) and a costume that weighed 45 pounds. The effect was so frightening that when waiting around the set, Karloff often wore a handkerchief over his face so as not to offend the crew.

Frankenstein marks the first time a studio promoted a movie by actually telling people to stay away. In fact, a scene was added to the beginning of the film in which a doctor instructs audience members to leave the theatre at once if they do not feel they have the stomach to view what comes next. Indeed, many people were not prepared for the violence and horror and complained about the film’s lack of morality. English critics cautioned that Frankenstein was a “freak picture, rated intense” that “cannot be judged by ordinary standards of entertainment” and should not be seen by “children and sensitive women.” Other commentators were outraged by three scenes in particular which they felt went beyond common decency. In the climactic laboratory scene, Dr. Henry Frankenstein witnesses the first signs of life in the creature and shouts the now famous words, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Immediately following that statement, he added, “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” That line was cut after protests, as was the scene in which the monster kills the troublesome hunchbacked dwarf (played by Dwight Frye, who portrayed Renfield in Dracula). But it was the notorious flower scene in which the monster throws Mary, a young village girl, into a lake, drowning her, that incited the loudest uproar. The scene was cut entirely until the movie was re-released years later. Even now, its more violent moments take place off-screen. Frankenstein was also one of the first movies to film two different endings, to be selected depending on how the audience responded. After a preview in which Henry was flung off a burning windmill and killed by the monster, audiences left disappointed. The studio opted for a happier ending in which Frankenstein survives (a voice-over was added in which a villager shouts, “He’s alive!”, providing a dramatic counterpoint to the earlier scene in the laboratory). Apparently audiences in 1931 did not think the doctor should be punished for trying to play God after all. Whereas Dracula had been a romantic thriller, Frankenstein went further, romanticizing and humanizing the predicament of a monster attacked on all sides by belligerent villagers. As a symbol of a tortured loner, Frankenstein touched American audiences on a deep psychological level. Soon Karloff as Frankenstein (the monster was often called by its creator’s name) developed his own fan club. On Halloween, American kids eagerly took to the streets dressed as their favorite monster, sporting shortened sleeves, fiendish makeup, and bolts on their necks.Universal helped solidify its reputation as the house of horrors by releasing a succession of sequels starring Boris Karloff. The Bride of Frankenstein, in many ways a superior film, appeared in 1935 (also directed by James Whale), Son of Frankenstein in 1939, and House of Frankenstein in 1944. Ironically, Lugosi, who had originally turned down the role, gave in and portrayed the monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942. Eager to repeat its success, Universal also invented other horror heroes. The Mummy (1932, also Boris Karloff) led to a series of popular sequels, as did The Wolf Man (1941, starring Lon Chaney, Jr.) By the end of the 40s, the genre began to run out of steam and devolved into low comedy in pictures like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which all the Universal monsters teamed up to wreak havoc.

After the Second World War, the novelty of seeing fiends like Dracula and Frankenstein on the screen was wearing thin. The atrocities of the Holocaust and the explosion of the atom bomb significantly altered the way in which American audiences reacted to horror. Instead of humanized monsters, audiences craved more mystery and a greater threat of peril. Now the monsters were less sympathetic (Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954) or alien creatures (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) representing a species that was more advanced, more intelligent, and infinitely more cruel. Seeking out enemies from beyond our own planet was a soothing notion after the devastating revelations of man’s inhumanity to man in World War II. Once the hydrogen bomb was detonated, it became apparent that world destruction was not just an idea, but a possibility, and many horror films from the 50s exploited this fear.

Ironically, Frankenstein and Dracula came back into vogue in the late 50s. Hammer Films in England came up with the notion of remaking the horror classics in color, winning over a new generation of fanatics by spilling buckets of bright red “blood” and showing realistically sharp fangs. The series, starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Frankenstein, helped revive Britain’s lagging film industry. The release of Universal’s famous horror movies on television also spawned a new generation of monster flicks and opened the door to questions about the suitability of showing them to young, impressionable audiences.

It was not until Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, that a horror movie created the same kind of sensation as had the original Dracula and Frankenstein. Using low-budget techniques, Hitchcock delved into the mind of a mentally deranged serial killer who murders patrons at his motel. Like Dracula and Frankenstein, Psycho is remarkable for its Gothic effects (Norman Bates’s bizarre house, the stuffed animals of prey). It similarly set off a stream of sequels and imitators such as Maniac (1963), Deranged (1974), and Halloween (1978), culminating (or deteriorating, depending on your point of view) in the set-piece style murder sprees of films such as Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

During the 60s and 70s, Hollywood and television also trotted out several new and different retellings of the old standards, and not all of these ventures were pure schlock. Roman Polanski offered his interpretation of horror with the Fearless Vampire Killers in 1967. Esteemed author Christopher Isherwood wrote a 1972 television version of Frankenstein starring Michael Sarrazin and James Mason which emphasized the story’s homoerotic elements. Andy Warhol, working with director Paul Morrissey, produced two of the most gruesome remakes in 1974, including the 3-D version Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein that included close-ups of entrails pouring out the monster’s torn abdomen. Mel Brooks had all of America rolling in the aisles that same year with his monstrous parody Young Frankenstein, and Michael Jackson later had a lot of fun spoofing the Wolf Man in his best-selling video Thriller (1982) directed by John Landis.

After more than a hundred movies about vampires, it is understandable that a figure like Dracula would also become the subject of many comedies. What is surprising is how entertaining some of them have been. George Hamilton scored a hit producing and starring in the inventive Love at First Bite (1979), while Blacula (1972) cornered a burgeoning black exploitation market. The less successful Vamp (1986) served as a vehicle for sultry disco diva Grace Jones.

In 1978, actor Frank Langella offered a suave update of the original play Dracula (the same one that Lugosi had done on Broadway in the 20s). The Broadway production featured sets by Edward Gorey and was soon turned into a stylized romantic thriller by John Badham. Frankenstein also had his day on Broadway in an ill-fated 1981 production featuring special effects by techno-wizard Bran Ferren (Altered States). The show closed after just one night, costing its investors millions and making it the most catastrophic flop in Broadway history. Dracula fared better recently when director Francis Ford Coppola returned to the original novel and wove a powerful film which rejoiced in bloodletting. His Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is a phantasmagorical vision of sexual invincibility in the age of AIDS.

In recent times, faced with such sophisticated and technically brilliant horror entertainment as Alien (1979), above, and Silence of the Lambs (1991), audiences remain glued to their seats, some shivering in fear, others laughing until their sides hurt. Gone are the gimmicky promotional gags, the elaborate warnings, the hired nurses. Gone too are the hammy acting and clumsy special effects of ground-breaking films like Dracula and Frankenstein. But the legacy of the terrifying spell they cast 60 years ago will always — like the monsters themselves — live on.

(©1993 Variety.)

Starved for some decent (or even indecent) reading material, I recently picked up a weathered old paperback copy of The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case by one of my favorite writers, George Baxt. Re-reading Tallulah’s wild exploits as a celebrity sleuth during the heyday of the McCarthy witch hunt (with cameos by Lillian Hellman and Patsy Kelly), I couldn’t stop laughing. The plot may not make much sense, and the prose is not exactly Proustian, but Baxt never fails to amuse and keep you turning pages. I wrote a blog piece on Baxt last December. Virtually forgotten today, he had at one time been a highly successful writer. I was curious to know more about him and why he had fallen out of favor. So I dug around and wrote this tribute to him. Since I am currently on hiatus, at work on a novel myself (and struggling mightily), I thought it would be fun (and easier for me) to revisit this article in case anyone out there missed it. Here it is again, in a slightly edited version.

The Mystery of George Baxt

In lofty discussions of pioneering gay writers in fancy literary journals, the name George Baxt rarely comes up. But Baxt, a former agent turned writer, was far more influential than he is given credit for. His work ranges from theater and film (he wrote the screenplay for the cult fright flick Circus of Horrors) to a series of popular mystery novels, including the ground-breaking pre-Stonewall classic: A Queer Kind of Death.

George Baxt was a true character, the kind of guy you’d love to have at a party, but would hate to have on your bad side. He had a wicked tongue, spitting out barbs like watermelon seeds. I never met the man. But I’d heard over the years about his enormous wealth of knowledge about the theater, old talkies and movie stars. He knew where all the bodies were buried and was never shy about spilling the dirt.  Reading through his hilarious books, of which I have a small collection, I got to thinking. Why isn’t George Baxt better known? It’s a riddle I tried to solve the only way I know how, by reading everything I could find about him.

I first encountered the name George Baxt when I stumbled upon a copy of a strange little book called A Queer Kind of Death. Published in 1966, it featured a campy gay detective, and a black one to boot: Pharoah Love. (The spelling mistake in his first name was deliberate). Pharoah Love was an audacious “cool cat” who loved jazz, his swanky Jaguar and sexy white boys. Campy, outrageous, arch and far-fetched, the novel created a sensation. This was before gay liberation and very few “legitimate” books were published with openly homosexual heroes. (For the record, there had been gay detectives in previous works, most notably, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and The Gay Detective by Lou Rand in 1960.) Baxt was shocked by the response. He hadn’t thought it was that unusual. He was basically writing about people and the life he knew in Greenwich Village and the rest of Manhattan. But the book struck a Pre-Stonewall nerve. It was hip, irreverent and sexy. Anthony Boucher of the New York Times gave it a rave review, noting that the salty tale “deals with a Manhattan subculture wholly devoid of ethics or morality. Staid readers may well find it shocking, but it is beautifully plotted and written with elegance and wit.” Rarely has a first book found such a devoted audience. The love affair with Pharoah Love continued. Baxt followed Queer up with two Love sequels: Swing Low, Sweet Harriet; and Topsy and Evil.

Later, I re-encountered Baxt’s work when I dove into The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the debut title in a series of mysteries he concocted in the 80s, using celebrity sleuths. He commandeered Noel Coward, George Raft, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and even Alfred Hitchcock into his series, penning riotous, madcap capers with each of them that are wickedly clever and entertaining.

For my money, none is funnier than the first one. The Dorothy Parker Murder Case is a marvel to read. The writing is fluid. Self-assured. Totally committed. And absolutely hilarious. It’s as if Baxt were channeling Dorothy Parker herself which is no small accomplishment. It opens with a harrowing bit of black comedy. Dorothy Parker is attempting suicide in the john of her hotel room after ordering lunch. “After slitting her wrists, Dorothy Parker sat in the bathroom waiting patiently to be rescued.” That’s all he needed to say. It sets the wry, but touching tone for the entire tale. I don’t think anyone has written a better celebrity sleuth mystery before or after. But Baxt had the inside scoop. He was always writing about people he knew personally. He was a familiar figure in the worlds he wrote about. The more I delved into his lively, but checkered past, the more I realized where he got the raw material for his scandalous books.

Like his most popular character Pharoah Love, Baxt was a fabulous creature of many talents and a cat of nine lives. But he also shied away from revealing interviews. Armed with very little to go on, I set out to see if I could fit together a few shreds of his life story. There’s no entry on him in Wikipedia, which is odd since he wrote over two dozen books and scripted numerous films. His name appears on IMDB as the screenwriter of such horror hits as the aforementioned Circus of Horrors and Horror Hotel. But there is little or no biographical information given.

Luckily I found an obituary for him written in England. (Except for a few isolated notices, the American media failed to mention his passing in 2003.) The obit focuses primarily on his film work in that country. Baxt had moved to England in the 50s and wrote most of his scripts there. Variety had posted a rather perfunctory obituary, again primarily because of the screen credits. But there was scant material for a researcher to rely on to find out where he came from and who his family was.

His book jackets provided a few more intriguing details. On the back of A Queer Kind of Death he wrote: “George Baxt was a dropout. He left Brooklyn College to pursue a writing career.” In another, he said he was born on a kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York. So taking that as a starting point, I did a little census-scouring and found that he was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1923, the son of Samuel Baxt, an operator at a clothing manufacturer who came over from Minsk, Russia around 1906. George’s mother was Lena Steinhouse whom Samuel had married in 1910. George had several siblings, a brother Morris, a sister Esther and a sister Juliette. They lived on Dumont Avenue. Nearby is an Isidore Baxt whom I presume is his uncle. He also came over from Minsk in 1906. By 1930, George’s father had opened his own grocery store on Avenue L.

Baxt joked later that he had an active sex life as a boy in Brooklyn. He was not shy. One commentator quoted him as saying he “regarded gay sex among the Irish, Italians, and Jews as normal.” Baxt settled down “with a boyfriend in high school, although he claimed to also have sex with teachers, particularly those in Physical Education.” He was probably just being his old provocative self. But it does indicate that Baxt was a rebel with a cause early on. He claimed in yet another wry author’s note that his first published piece appeared in the Brooklyn Times-Union when he was nine. He was paid a couple of dollars for it and got bit by the freelance writer’s bug. He scribbled articles in high school and won the Columbia Scholastic Press Award. He sold his first radio script at 18.

Baxt went to City College and Brooklyn College before dropping out to pursue his passion for the theatre. His first venture was a musical play called Pity the Kiddies which was performed in 1942 for one night only at the Barbizon Plaza’s concert hall. In March that year he performed as an actor in Theatre of the Soul by Nicolai Evreinov, right, staged by his friend William Boyman.

Baxt claimed to have been in the armed services which might explain the gap in his career credits from 1942 to 1945. But I have not found any records of such service. He also claimed to have been a “propagandist for Voice of America.” In 1946, he wrote a one-act play Laughter of Ladies that was produced at a theatre showcase on 47th Street. A year later he penned a comedy, Alex in Wonderland, about a Jewish family in Canarsie. Boyman announced that Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress, was set to star in it, but it never seems to have gotten off the ground. Later he changed the title to Make Momma Happy and it made the rounds. At one point Sidney Lumet (son of the famous Yiddish actor Baruch Lumet, and later film director) was slated to appear in it. In 1948 Blanche Yurka announced she was to star in Laughter of Ladies. Then Estelle Winwood was added to the cast. (In his Tallulah Bankhead book, which features Winwood, Baxt makes it clear that Yurka was fired because the producers and directors found her wanting. He also makes the outlandish claim she was a murderess, but that’s another story.) The play failed to get picked up. It was eventually staged with Grayson Hall (of Dark Shadows fame) in a New Jersey summer theater in 1953, and went on tour to Hartford and Philadelphia in the fall. It never appears to have made it to Broadway. (Baxt actors: Dullea, Picon, Yurka and Zachary Scott, below).

Obviously George Baxt was having a hard time gate-crashing the Great White Way. He often got pocket change by pitching stories to Walter Winchell. “Always on the hunt for new clients,” his UK obit says, “he would ride in the elevator in the Algonquin Hotel to find out who was staying there.” This experience would serve him well later in his Dorothy Parker novel. As an actor’s agent, he was not always a good judge of up-and-coming talent. He admitted to throwing a young James Dean out of his office because the kid needed a shower!

Later Baxt found side work as a disc jockey to make ends meet. An announcement in the Times in 1953 says he had signed a rental lease at 449 E. 58th Street. (Apparently there was nothing odd in those days about publishing one’s address in the paper). Judging by the tony East Side address, he couldn’t have been doing too poorly.

In the mid-50s he segued from radio into television. He scouted talent for The Big Show, helping Tallulah Bankhead land a lucrative gig on there. By 1955 he penned a comedy for NBC called The Way Things Happen starring Peter Lind Hayes. He made a bigger splash with a David Susskind production of Mrs. Miniver for TV, starring Maureen O’Hara in the Greer Garson role. Keir Dullea and Juliette Mills co-starred.

In 1956 he returned to the theater, writing a sketch for Ben Bagley’s show The Littlest Revue at the Phoenix. But nothing came from that. His dream of making his name on the stage came to a crashing halt.

Faced with the distressing fact that he couldn’t catch a break on Broadway, and that several of his clients were blacklisted as Red sympathizers, Baxt escaped to England, and accepted an offer from producer Hannah Weinstein to work on the British TV series Sword of Freedom. “I went to England on a three-month contract and stayed five years,” he later said. The show starred Edmund Purdom, of The Student Prince fame, as an artist and freedom fighter in Florence during the Renaissance. “A lot of later famous people starred,” Baxt quipped.  “Joan Plowright played Mona Lisa. I wrote 10 of the 39 episodes. I used to call it ‘The Sword of Boredom.’”

Eager for a change, Baxt began writing horror films for British producers, and struck gold. Circus of Horrors was cited by the New York Times as “the crispest, handsomest and most stylish movie shocker in a long time.” But horror was not all Baxt was up to. One of his niftiest flicks was Payroll, a taut gangster film, featuring Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw.

In 1961, Baxt wrote the eerie thriller Shadow of the Cat, about a fierce feline seeking revenge on those who murdered its mistress. Creating an aura of suspense, director John Gilling filmed it entirely from a cat’s-eye view. Other credits include Burn, Witch, Burn. Not surprisingly, Baxt also had a hand in the camp classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes starring Vincent Price. Although uncredited, Baxt is said to have come up with the now-famous device of having Phibes rise out of the floor playing his ghoulish pipe organ.

Perhaps longing for his show biz roots, or the gay life of Manhattan, Baxt of The Scarlet Pimpernel returned to Amerca in the early 60s. He landed a plum assignment, writing a new adaptation for CBS. Starring Maureen O’Hara, Zachary Scott and Michael Rennie, it was another David Susskind hit. The Times called it “exciting and richly mounted.” (At left, a pulp Pimpernel released at the time of Baxt’s adaptation on TV.)

He collaborated on a new suspense series My Son, the Detective that was probably too camp for its own good. He also wrote episodes of The Defenders. In 1963 Broadway beckoned anew. Judy Holliday was set to play in Baxt’s latest play, Not in Her Stars, with Martin Gabel. But nothing materialized. Gabel went on to act in Marnie instead. Then in 1964 the play was revived. Nancy Walker the comedian was slated to direct. Jane Wyman hoped to bring it to Broadway with co-star Anita Louise. Alas, it too, like Phibes’s organ, was a mere pipe dream.

No doubt these repeated failures broke Baxt’s spirit. He abandoned the stage completely. For two years he seems to have done nothing, or so reports in the Times indicate. Two years of silence. But Baxt broke that silence with his outspoken first novel, A Queer Kind of Death and his career took a whole new turn. He wrote the two Love sequels, then launched a new series of “wild, wacky, and weird” mysteries featuring detective Max Van Larsen in such farcical fare as A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures. Among Baxt’s other books are The Affair at Royalties (1971) and Burning Sappho (1972).

In 1972 he returned to the silver screen to write Tower of Evil (aka) Horror on Snape Island, based on his novel of the same name. He did not always have the Midas Touch when it came to books. His 1979 novel, The Neon Graveyard, a scathing send-up of Hollywood, was panned by Newgate Callendar in the Crime Books review section at the Times. That proved to be one of the few bad notices he ever got. Even the great doyenne of mysteries, Ruth Rendell, who is not known for dispensing superlatives with ease, described Baxt as “brilliant and hilarious,” adding, “I love reading George Baxt.”

Baxt caught his breath and dreamed up the celebrity sleuth series which put him back at the top of his game. He even wrote himself into a few, depicting a character named George Baxt. It was his own Hitchcock moment. He continued to write until the 1990s. According to Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold, who wrote about Baxt and interviewed him when the latter was living in Los Angeles, Baxt was very proud that the clever epigrams in the Dorothy Parker volume were all his own creation. “He told me that the people who made Mrs Parker & The Vicious Circle,” Feingold recalls, “had tried to get him to share the historical basis for the lines he wrote so they could use them in the script.  He said, ‘I invented them and if you want to use them, you’ll have to pay me!’”

Towards the end of his career, he was wooed back into writing again about Pharoah Love, his most popular creation, whom he’d killed off in Topsy & Evil. He penned two “sequels,” A Queer Kind of Love and A Queer Kind of Umbrella, set in Chinatown and using a second Pharoah Love character. But they did little to revive interest in him or his earlier work. By then his accomplishment in writing successful gay mysteries was overshadowed by the impact of Joseph Hansen and his Brandstetter mysteries which were more in the traditional hard-boiled vein and much more accessible to a wider audience. Most people I’ve talked to who are interested in vintage gay literature (and believe me, it’s a vanishing breed) have never even heard of George Baxt. He died at the age of 80 in 2003. Typically the New York Times didn’t even bother to write him an obituary even though he had been one of their favorite authors.

I wish I had met George Baxt. Maybe somewhere along the line I did, but didn’t know it. Although from what I’ve read that sounds hard to do. Journalist Tom Vallance once described meeting Baxt: “I had lunch with Baxt just once, several years ago in New York, and found him wonderful company with great zest and a rich fund of anecdotes. He could also be caustic, and he had been known over the years to have alienated some of his friends. His family described him as ‘outrageous and curmudgeonly, a complaining, perpetual naysayer’, but added that he always remembered to phone on birthdays and give presents to the children.”

I can see Baxt as a doting crotchety uncle. But one also gets the sense reading about George Baxt that he was pretty much a loner. On one book jacket he described himself as “a collector of film and theatre books [who] sits up till all hours for old movies on television.” He said his best friend was his VCR. Clive Hirschhorn, author of The Warner Brothers Story, recalled to Vallance that Baxt’s “knowledge of movies was truly vast — he could name all the girls who dance on the aeroplane wings in Flying Down to Rio!”

While there is not much else about George Baxt online or elsewhere, he is mentioned in a fun book of recollections by Wendy Werris called An Alphabetical Life. In it she describes a luncheon at Pete’s Tavern in Manhattan in 1986 when she first met him. “Baxt was a rather small man in his mid-sixties, plump yet graceful and with thinning gray hair. Although I was friends with several gay men at that time, I had never met such a flamboyant queen as he. If you can imagine a swish, fey and girlish Phil Silvers, you’ll have a picture of George Baxt. He was hilarious and irreverent. He batted his eyelashes to make a point when telling a dirty joke. His Brooklyn accent was delicious, and he had stories to tell about every great star from the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond. You never heard dirt dished until you heard it from the mouth of George Baxt.”

Werris goes on to tell some sizzling anecdotes involving Sal Mineo and what nasty things Baxt wishes Gidget had done in her movies besides just going to Rome and Hawaii. In just a few snippets of conversation, Werris captures the ribald spirit of the man. It’s the same priceless humor you can enjoy simply by reading any of George Baxt’s campy books or seeing one of his thrilling movies.