Jack Pierce and The Bride

Here’s a find, I think. There are lots of photos of master makeup man Jack Pierce working on or posing with Boris Karloff for his three outings as Frankenstein’s Monster, but no shots of Pierce with Elsa Lanchester in BRIDE makeup had ever surfaced, to my knowledge, until now.

The photograph here was found in the June 1935 issue of New Movie magazine, just one of 12 small photos of movie stars sharing space with cartoons and copy in a busy spread called Hollywood: Day by Day. Reporter “Nemo” rattles off short items of bubbleheaded scuttlebutt about such matters of import as Bing Crosby’s day at the racetrack, Jean Harlow’s cellophane swimsuit, Clark Gable’s big new car, and Lyle Talbot dropping his favorite fedora into Pat O’Brien’s pool. Ann Dvorak poses with her lucky rabbit’s foot and the Bride picture carries a laconic caption: “Elsa Lanchester wears fantastic make-up for ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.”

New Movie, claiming “the largest circulation of any screen magazine in the world”, first mentioned BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in January of 1935, when Karloff was said to be preparing for The Return of Frankenstein. That issue also carried a profile of Boris, entitled Karloff The Uncanny. In May, the film was now called BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and “guaranteed to give you bad dreams for three weeks”. A short, smart-alecky review signed Barbara Barry — “New Movies Studio Scout”  — outlined the film and blew the punch: “And then, after all their work, the incorporated damsel (Elsa Lanchester) takes one look at her prospective bride-groom and proceeds to shriek herself unconscious! All of which makes Karloff so dern mad that he blows up the whole joint!” In the same issue, Ms Barry, who seemed to relish the art of the spoiler, also blurts out the ending to WEREWOLF OF LONDON, though she is careful not to reveal the denouement of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, but making a big deal about how she’s holding back on a big surprise.

We’ve seen photos of Lanchester in her Bride costume posing with a hand mirror and a makeup pencil, fixing her lipstick, as if the perfect beestung look painted by Jack Pierce needed a touchup. One wonders if Pierce, standing by, was simply cropped out of those shots. Nevertheless, we now have a shot of Jack Pierce with one of his masterpieces, the weirdly glamorous Bride.

And now the hunt is on for a shot of Pierce with Lugosi as The Monster from FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943). There are shots of Pierce working on Lugosi’s Igor — broken neck, snaggle tooth, fright wig and all — for SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) and GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942), but no photograph of Pierce with Lugosi’s Frankenstein Monster has surfaced yet. 

All Girl Frankenstein

The stage has been an essential medium in the cultural life of Frankenstein. When Mary Shelley’s book was published in 1818, its modest run of 500 copies quickly sold out and the title fell out of print. It might have been forgotten or perhaps remembered as a gothic curio if not for playwright Richard Brinsley Peake. His fanciful adaptation of 1823, Presumption, or: The Fate of Frankenstein, was such a sensation that William Godwin, Mary’s father, arranged for a new edition of the novel, reviving its literary career. The play itself spawned countless knock-offs that would keep multiplying through the years, new adaptations generally inspired by other theatrical versions instead of the original book. When James Whale made the classic FRANKENSTEIN in 1931, the film was based on yet another play, Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: An Adventure into the Macabre.

To this day, some version or another of Frankenstein — pro, amateur, straight, comedic or musical — is being staged somewhere every week, and the story’s exceptionally compelling themes are often explored by experimental ensembles, as with this recent version by Bob Fisher and The Chicago Mammals. All Girl Frankenstein premiered in October 2013. In January this year, the group performed a special version called Three Girl Frankenstein in which three actresses played all the parts.

All Girl Frankenstein is one of a series of plays where Chicago actresses get to play parts traditionally cast with men. The group staged All Girl Moby Dick in 2012 and All Girl Edgar Allen Poe is being prepared for October 2014.

The Chicago Mammals blog carries bios of all the participants. Pictured in this post, at the top, is Erin Meyers as Victor Frankenstein. Pictured above are Amy E. Harmon as The Creature and Erin Orr as Henry Clerval. Another Mammals regular, Liz Chase, played a creepy lab assistant who sets up the play in a prologue. Completing the circle, the assistant character serving as narrator is a theatrical invention originated by Peake all the way back in 1823.

Reviews of All Girl Frankenstein in The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Theater Beat.

Related:

Inflatable Frankenstein

500 Clown Frankenstein

Mortal Toys

Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love

Robby Hecht's Melancholy Frankenstein

The Monster and his Bride have enjoyed a busy music video career as stand-ins for star-crossed lovers, often to comedic effect. Here, set to Robby Hecht’s plaintive, country-styled “Soon I Was Sleeping”, the tone is downright mournful as our jigsaw couple’s perennially problematic love affair is irrevocably wrecked by alcohol. Brian T. O’Neil plays the beat-up Monster and Kayla McKenzie Moore is the ethereal Bride. Ryan Newman directed in appropriately moody black and white.

Robby Hecht is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter whose insightful compositions have made him an important new voice in contemporary folk. With a talent for surrounding himself with blue-chip talent, he is accompanied on the song at hand by Canadian vocalist Rose Cousins. “Soon I Was Sleeping” appears on Hecht’s new album, released in March.

Robby Hecht’s website.

Reviews on the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy, UK’s The Telegraph, and USA Today.

Related:

The Rockabilly Bride of Frankenstein

The Country Bride of Frankenstein

Frankenstein in New York Frankenstein on Broadway

A deadpan Monster floats over Broadway, photographed during a revival run that opened on July 21, 1934. On its original release, late 1931, posters for FRANKENSTEIN carried a line under the title — as close to a subtitle the film ever had — reading, The Man Who Made a Monster. Here, surprisingly, the film’s title clearly reads FRANKENSTEIN THE KILLER, the only such known occurrence.

The Globe, its name evoking Shakespeare, was built as a high-hat, legit theater in 1910, with its vast entrance on 46th Street sporting soaring arches and a second-floor balcony where you could step outside and watch carriages unloading patrons. Inside, the latest innovations included a pipe and vent system bringing steam heat or ice cooling, season depending, to individual seats. The roof was built to slide open on a track system, though there is no record of it ever being used, with street noise, chimney soot and weather conditions likely providing reasons to keep the lid on. For twenty years, the Globe sparkled as one of New York’s leading theaters, home of such celebrated shows as the Ziegfield Follies and George White’s Scandals, Irving Berlin musicals and performances by Sarah Bernhardt and Fanny Brice. In 1929, owner Charles Dillingham was wiped out in the Stock Market Crash and the Globe went into receivership, soon to be one of several New York playhouses bought up by the Brandt chain and turned into movie houses.

The four Brandt brothers had kicked off their exhibitor career operating a hand-cranked projector stand at Coney Island, graduating to Nickelodeons and building up a theater circuit. Even as the Great Depression was hitting, the Brandts sold their holdings to Fox Pictures and used the proceedings to start another chain, snapping up failing theaters at downscale prices, kicking out the live burlesque and vaudeville acts and converting the premises to talkies. By the late Thirties, the Brandts owned 7 of the 11 movie houses on 42nd Street. They would go on to own 150 cinemas in New York and the upper East Coast.

When the Globe switched to movies in 1932, its opulent 46th Street façade was closed and the box-office moved to a small secondary entrance on Broadway. The Brandts hardly ever advertised, using instead the prime, high-visibility frontage on Times Square to announce their picture shows and pull patrons in from right off the street, or from among the thousands who stopped in next door for lunch at the Automat — the legendary diner which appears to have been the focus of our photograph.

The Globe splashed its loud displays clear across its narrow front and all the way up to full building height, like a vertical billboard, framing titles and movie star portraits in neon and dancing lights. FRANKENSTEIN rated a giant headshot of Karloff’s Monster with “The Killer” and “It’s a Sensation” in lightbulbs atop the marquee.

The Globe would run movies until 1957 when the theater changed hands and returned to its theatrical roots. The interior was gutted, its old configuration sacrificed to fine acoustics and modern styling. The narrow Broadway access was shut forever and the lavish 46th Street entrance restored. The Globe reopened in May of 1958 as the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, honoring the famous husband and wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. In the years since, top shows have included The Sound of Music and Hello Dolly!, Richard Burton as Hamlet, and the work of Bob Fosse and Marlene Dietrich. Disney’s live Beauty and the Beast premiered here in 1999.

For a century now, legends of stage and film have graced this storied house. For a fast few days in 1934, FRANKENSTEIN THE KILLER — Guaranteed for Gasps — stalked onscreen and stared down New Yorkers from his perch in the heart of Broadway.

The Globe Theater on Jerry’s Brokendown Palaces and Greenbriar Picture Shows.

The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

Related:

The Frankenstein of 14th Street

Frankenstein in New York The Frankenstein of 14th Street

By the time James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN made it to New York, the film had hopscotched across America for two weeks, toppling box-office records along the way. On December 4, 1931, New Yorkers queued outside the Mayfair Theater in freezing rain for a look at the season’s Monster sensation. Extra showings were added to accommodate the endless crowds and by week’s end, over 76,000 patrons had set a new attendance record for the Times Square venue. The film would deploy to other area movie houses as a reliable attraction well into 1932.

This wonderful still of a Frankenstein Monster stand-in perched on an RKO promo truck has been circulating on the net, but without information as to date or location. It’s obviously an early promo stunt. The title of a Cagney film, BLONDE CRAZY —released, like FRANKENSTEIN, in mid-November ‘31 — appears behind the box-office booth. The theater is identified on the truck panel: It’s the RKO Jefferson, at 214 East 14th Street, near 3rd Avenue.

Universal’s Publicity Department suggested the “robot ballyhoo” stunt, having someone in Monster getup patrol the lobby and house front, or going for a spin around the block lugging ads on a sandwich board. Any tall man in a dark suit would do, usually decked-out in a fright wig and some greenish makeup to help the illusion. The player, here, is unidentified — perhaps a slumming vaudevillian or just someone off the street. A job was a job in Depression times. This facsimile Frankenstein wears a long-haired widow’s peak wig, knee-high boots and heavy gloves, like mechanical hands. FRANKENSTEIN posters sometimes gave Karloff what appears to be riveted steel arms.

Built in 1913 in the notorious Gashouse District as a top-notch Vaudeville theater, the Jefferson earned a reputation among show people as “the toughest house in New York”. The Marx Borthers, George Burns and Mae West were among those who braved the turbulent audiences.

Live acts still supported the featured movies when the theater was refurbished in 1947, but attendance had begun a downward trend, not the least because of wholesale evictions as the city enacted a plan to remodel the neighborhood. Competition from television would accelerate the Jefferson’s decline. KING KONG (1933) played the Jefferson on its highly publicized re-release in 1952, and horror host Zacherley brought his live spook show there in the Sixties. In the Seventies, on its last legs, the house switched to Spanish language programming for a while and then, in increasingly depressing disrepair, turned to porno. The once-proud Jefferson was eventually abandoned, an eyesore for twenty years until it was demolished in 1999.

An interesting sidenote: Right next door to the Jefferson is an Otto Altenburg piano store. Back in the day, the Altenburg company made a point of opening piano showrooms on the same block as theaters. The New Jersey-based company, founded in 1855, is still going strong today. The second-floor showroom at 212 East 14th Street closed in the late Thirties and was taken over by Irving Klaw’s legendary Movie Star News store, an exclusive outlet for celebrity photos and Klaw’s famous home-made cheescake and bondage stills. By the Fifties, it would become the go-to shop for Bettie Page fans. Movie Star News moved away in the mid-Eighties, when the area was at its seediest. The neighborhood today is completely transformed but the site of the storied Jefferson remains an empty lot.

Attended by men in hats and caps, including one gentleman in a neat bowler, the Frankenstein of 14th Street recalls a lost era when a couple could see live entertainment and a new movie in a palace settting for change on a dollar and the fun spilled onto the street outside, the house front festooned with eye-popping displays — note the Frankenstein title in dancing 3-D letters — and you might even bump into The Monster himself!

Sources: Cinema Treasures, Altenburgh Pianos.

Related:

All Seats 35 Cents

The Selling of Frankenstein