Shambling Towards Hiroshima Read online

  Slowly, languorously, my left eyelid lifted into my skull, followed by the right, a process as protracted as the somnambulist’s great black orbs flickering open at Caligari’s command. My carotid arteries spasmed. My throat throbbed. A mad scientist had amputated my tongue and grafted a slug in its place. Gradually I became aware of four astonishing facts. I was still in Dagover’s private theater, my body lay sprawled across a divan in the corner, somebody had stolen my wrist radio, and it was nine o’clock in the morning, or so my pocket watch claimed, unless, of course, it was nine at night — a dubious theory, since that would mean I’d been unconscious nearly twenty-four hours.

  “Good morning, Syms,” Dagover said, thereby clearing up some of my confusion. He was straddling a chair beside the projection booth, his arms folded on the headrest, contemplating me with his most remorseless Werdistratus gaze. Rudolph hovered in the background, waiting to do Dagover’s bidding like Noble Johnson anticipating Lugosi’s next directive in Murders in the Rue Morgue.

  Nine A.M. There was still enough time for me to make the four-hour drive to China Lake and star in the momentous matinee performance of What Rough Beast. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be” — for all his flaws, Dagover was surely not an enemy spy, but I decided to maintain my cover story anyway — “on my way to Burbank, so I can do that VD film for the Army.”

  “I remember,” Dagover said. He wore a green satin smoking jacket. Balanced on his lower lip, his unlit cigarette moved up and down like a semaphore as he talked. “And Monday you start shooting Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra. Don’t worry — I already spoke to Darlene. She knows you spent the night here.”

  “Give me my wrist radio back. I need to call the gonorrhea people and tell them I’ll be late for the shoot.”

  “You mean that thing’s real? I thought you got it out of a Cracker Jack box.”

  “Give it back.”

  “‘All in good time,’ as I told you in the final reel of Flesh of Iron.”

  I made a rigid arc with my thumb and middle finger, using these fleshly calipers to massage my aching temples. “I feel like Corpuscula. My brains have burst out of my skull.”

  “Had a little too much amontillado, did we?”

  “It sure packs quite a wallop.”

  “One might almost imagine I drugged you,” Dagover said.

  Stretching my arms, extending my legs, I took an inventory of myself. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, eyes, ears, jaw: all my thespian assets were in working order. I was ready to act my heart out in Hangar A. Had Dagover said drugged? Huh? What?

  “You drugged me?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Dagover said, lighting his cigarette.

  “You just did.”

  “I needed to make sure you remained behind after the other guests left. The door to my movie theater is locked, and the key resides in a secret location. It would not be an exaggeration to say you are my prisoner.”

  “Have you gone mad?” I said, another line from Flesh of Iron.

  “A plausible theory,” Dagover said. “The evidence is persuasive. Not only did I put a sedative in your sherry, I’m about to train a gun on your heart.” From the pocket of his smoking jacket he produced a derringer, which he pointed in my direction. “It’s loaded.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “My terms are simple. This were-lizard of yours is precisely what my career needs right now. The suit is marvelous, and the premise sounds even better. Our protagonist starts out a Karloffian goody-goody — right? — looking to cure cancer with lizard glands — am I getting warm? — but he feels obligated to experiment on himself, and the injections turn him into a reptilian horror — I’m hot now, yes? — living in sewers and crashing into the heroine’s boudoir. Obviously the script demands a virtuoso performance, and I’m the man to deliver it.”

  “There is no script,” I said.

  “Shut up,” Dagover said. “I haven’t finished. The instant I snap my fingers, Rudolph will fetch my typewriter. I’m going to dictate a cover letter to him, which you will sign forthwith.” He took an elegant Continental drag on his cigarette. “‘To whom it may concern. Darlene Wasserman and I wrote the attached screenplay, Curse of the Were-Lizard, with Siegfried Dagover in mind. So profound is our commitment to seeing Mr. Dagover in the lead, we have given him our Gorgantis costume to do with as he pleases. While I might accept a small part in the film, I shall not consider playing the monster under any conditions. Yours truly, Syms J. Thorley.’ Well, my friend, do we have a deal?”

  “There is no Gorgantis script.”

  “Let’s make sure you understand the stakes,” Dagover said, stroking his derringer. “If you don’t give me this plum, I’m going to keep you here through Tuesday night, which means you’ll miss the first two shooting days on Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra, which means Sam will fire you, which means he’ll hire me to play the mummy, and we can’t have that, can we?”

  “Siggy, you’ve got to let me go right now! You don’t understand! There is no Gorgantis script! There’s only this thing called What Rough Beast, which Brenda wrote under a Navy contract after some scientists at a secret Mojave lab started feeling guilty about breeding psychopathic incendiary lizards as biological weapons!”

  “My insane actor impersonation is good, Syms, but yours is better.”

  “I’m not kidding! Operation Fortune Cookie!”

  “My ass.”

  Dear reader, dear God, what other choice did I have? Surely we can agree that I was obligated to tell Dagover the whole story: the horrendous behemoths, Ivan Groelish’s petition to President Truman, the failure of the Midget Lizard Initiative, Obie’s model city, the recent arrival of a Japanese delegation on American soil. And so I did. I unbagged every confidential cat and spilled each classified bean. Naturally Dagover greeted my tale with disbelief, but his doubts began to dissipate after I showed him my ID badge and explained that the New Amsterdam Project was a code name for the Knickerbocker Project. His skepticism vanished altogether after Rudolph went off to reconnoiter the manor grounds and returned with the news that the fleet in the driveway indeed included a U.S. Navy panel truck whose cargo bay contained the lizard suit.

  “Now that I’ve heard the whole story, I must admit it makes more sense than what I read in the Examiner,” Dagover said. “I kept asking myself, ‘Where did Thorley get the money to commission such a classy monster rig?’” He firmed his grip on the derringer. “I guess the Navy would be pretty unhappy to hear you’ve been blabbing about their iguanas. Don’t worry, Syms, I’ll keep everything under my hat.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “So do the thousands of American boys waiting to invade the Japanese mainland.”

  “Sounds like the Knickerbocker people are counting on you for a performance to beat the band,” Dagover said.

  “You got that right,” I said. “So if you’ll please put down your gun, return my Dick Tracy set, and unlock the door, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Not so fast, Syms. Something just occurred to me. Whoever wrecks that Shirazuka model this afternoon is going to end up a kind of war hero — right? — with lots of honors and Hollywood contracts to follow. I’m thinking the savior in question might as well be me.”

  “No, Siggy. Bad idea.”

  “I’ll put on the costume and get Rudolph to drive me out to Inyokern. ‘Poor old Syms Thorley,’ I’ll tell your Admiral Yordan. ‘He’s sick as a dog. But you needn’t worry, sir. Siegfried K. Dagover is here to save the day.’ It’s all so delicious, don’t you think? A Kraut with his own print of Triumph of the Will ending World War Two. There’s some real poetry in that, if you ask me.”

  “What you’re saying is crazy, and you know it. You haven’t rehearsed. You haven’t studied Brenda’s script. The suit has all sorts of quirks.”

  “Script? What script? Gorgantis wades ashore, finds a goddamn Willis O’Brien city full of slant-eyed fanatics, burns it down, fade-out.”

  “Siggy, please, I’ve put a hun
dred hours into preparing for this part. You could never bring it off. If the demonstration shot fails, there won’t be any accolades for you. You’ll spend the next forty years hanging your head in shame.”

  “I’m already hanging my head in shame. You think I’m going to get a fucking Oscar for Revenge of Corpuscula?”

  “Besides, I’ve got a much better scheme.” Did I? Indeed — not a plan I liked, but it was the lesser of two evils. “Send Rudolph back to the truck. He’ll find a script on the passenger seat.”

  “You said there wasn’t one.”

  “A completely different project, the best werewolf script ever, authored by yours truly. Except I didn’t write it, Siggy. You did. Just retype the title page. ‘Lycanthropus, a Screenplay by Siegfried K. Dagover.’ Tell Cohn and Zanuck and Lewton you always knew you had a script in you, and here it is.”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “I’m on the level, you Jew-hating goyische Nazi schmuck! This is your fucking destiny, Siggy! This is opportunity knocking on your wooden head!”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t talk that way to somebody who was pointing a gun at me.”

  “Cross my heart, Baron Ordlust will write your ticket to the fucking Horror Hall of Fame! Long after everybody’s forgotten about Karloff and Lugosi and — what’s-his-name? — Thorley, they’ll remember Siegfried Dagover!”

  My nemesis furrowed his brow, pocketed his derringer, and dispatched Rudolph to fetch the masterly scenario in question. He returned within five minutes, bearing my Lycanthropus satchel.

  “This better be good,” Dagover informed me.

  “Promise me one thing,” I said. “Read it quickly. Even as we speak, the Jap delegation is having breakfast at China Lake.”

  “I’ll read it at whatever velocity suits my mood.”

  “Jesus Christ, Siggy.”

  “Big man in my church.”

  “Do you have even the remotest idea of the geopolitical implications of keeping me locked up here?”

  Instead of answering, Dagover announced that he was going to his first-floor study, the place where he did all his best work.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said, climbing the stairs. “If I decide to let you go” — he inserted the key in the lock — “you have to give me your solemn word.”

  “About what?”

  “About joining the Siegfried Dagover Fan Club.”

  “My pleasure,” I said between gritted teeth. “While I’m at it, I’ll recruit Darlene. I didn’t know there was a Siegfried Dagover Fan Club.”

  “There isn’t,” Dagover said, twisting the key with the emphatic theatricality of Werdistratus switching on a dynamo. “You’re going to start one. Naturally I’ll expect you to be the first president, and the vice-president, too. Maybe we can get the Rubinstein girls to design the membership cards.”

  V

  FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning. The hour when, it is said, more people die in their sleep, dream of illicit love, and write bad lines of movie dialogue than at any other time of day. Like Sam Katzman supervising one of his Monogram epics, I have managed to keep this memoir on schedule, largely because the last chapter flowed from my pen without any interruptions, no misdirected call girls, no room service deliveries, no visitors from Porlock, no ravens bearing intimations of mortality. Instant coffee courses though my veins, flushing old memories into consciousness from the deepest reaches of my brain.

  Only once did the torrent of ink stop. The fault was mine. Shortly after composing the scene in which the Santa Monica police capture Gorgantis on the beach, I took a bathroom break and, instead of heading directly back to my desk, absently flicked on the television. I spun through the cable channels and — presto — there it was, Atom-Age Lycanthropus, 1957, the eighth and final entry in the successful series that had started eleven years earlier when B-movie actor Siegfried Dagover peddled a clever little werewolf script to Harry Cohn at Columbia. Until the day the project went before the cameras, I’m sure Dagover feared I would step forward and claim credit for the screenplay or, worse, the delicious concept at its core: Baron Basil Ordlust, the aristocratic thrill-seeker who travels the world in quest of the man-beast whose bite will transport him to hidden realms of decadent ecstasy. But a bargain is a bargain, even in Hollywood. When I handed Siggy his breakthrough role, I meant that he should keep it.

  Crisply lensed by Karl Freund and smartly directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the present scene was infinitely depressing — and not just because that should have been me up there on the screen, and instead it was Dagover, suavely solidifying his mystique as the Ronald Coleman of horror movies. What really bothered me was the undeniable skill with which the bastard had milked the moment. The scene found Ordlust in the Mexican jungles, hiding out in the temple of the local jaguar-goddess and trying to convince her fleshly avatar, lasciviously played by Ruth Roman, to favor him with her fangs. An entirely standard situation for the series, but Dagover and Roman brought so much erotic energy to the encounter you could practically see the pheromones fluttering around them like moths. Gesture by gesture, intonation by intonation, Dagover was doing everything right.

  To this day, film scholars wonder why Columbia’s Lycanthropus was the only monster from the classic Hollywood pantheon to last into the fifties, when audience tastes in genre horror shifted radically from the gothic to the cosmic. I suspect this success can be traced to two facts: Baron Ordlust never shared the screen with Abbott and Costello, who belonged exclusively to Universal, and Harry Cohn insisted that his writers work radioactivity or an alien visitation into every Lycanthropus installment, preferably both. On first principles, werewolves and flying saucers have little in common, but Cohn’s loyal pencil-pushers rose to the occasion.

  Consider Lycanthropus in Space, in which the Baron convinces a team of rocket scientists to send him to Venus, planet of shape-shifting carrot-women. Or Galactic Lycanthropus, in which an extraterrestrial scientist lands on Earth and attempts to extract the life essence from Baron Ordlust, whose joie de vivre is exactly what’s needed back on Procyon-5. When that particular entry was being cast, in February of 1955, my career had bottomed out, so Cohn and Dagover threw me a bone, the role of the phlegmatic alien. I acquitted myself well, but I was better in What Rough Beast.

  It would be an understatement to say that Commander Quimby wanted my head on a platter, my ass in a sling, and my guts on a loom after, having recovered my wrist radio from Dagover, I called him and confessed that a rival had drugged me the previous night at a Hollywood party, with the result that the demonstration shot might have to be delayed by as much as an hour. Back then there were no intercontinental rockets bearing thermonuclear warheads, but Quimby still went ballistic, asserting that Yordan would probably be forced to improvise delaying tactics, “such as challenging the Jap delegation to a sake-drinking contest,” a potentially disastrous development that could easily make them “too sloshed to take the annihilation of Shirazuka seriously.” Before shutting off his radio, Quimby calmed down and started thinking strategically. He told me he would order the California Highway Patrol to permit all Navy panel trucks zooming north on Route 14 to break the speed limit and any other statutes that might prevent me from reaching China Lake on time.

  No sooner had the behemoth and I motored away from Mastodon Manor than a fresh disaster struck. Glancing at the gas gauge, I saw that it was within a hair’s-breadth of E — E for egregious oversight, execrable planning, extraordinary stupidity. Today was Sunday. All the service stations would be closed. Gasoline, gasoline everywhere, and not a drop to fuel the end of World War Two. Even my friend Gorgantis betrayed me. Three days earlier I’d drained all the petroleum from his tail during target practice in an Inglewood automobile graveyard, incinerating rocks and cacti, the derelict cars themselves having been carted off long ago as scrap metal for the military.

  I hadn’t a prayer of reaching Inyokern, but I figured I could limp back to Mastodon Manor. My calculation proved correct. Just a
s I was pulling into Dagover’s driveway, the engine gasped, groaned, and conked out entirely. When I explained the situation, Dagover proved uncharacteristically sympathetic — he was still giddy over his theft of the Lycanthropus script — and he cheerfully lent me his Duesenberg, which happened to have a full tank.

  Mindful that we could probably use the backup lizard in the Quonset hut at the Château Mojave, I considered ditching the PRR. Being unfamiliar with the duplicate’s quirks and kinks, however, I soon thought better of the idea, so I strapped Gorgantis to the roof of Dagover’s car like a canoe. Shortly after zooming past the L.A. city limits, I started wondering if I should get on my Dick Tracy set and instruct Quimby to tell the state police to ignore all Duesenbergs bearing dinosaurs. But I really didn’t want to deal with the commander again. If a trooper pulled me over, I would simply explain that I was delivering the monster to a diner in Bakersfield, so they could use it to advertise their newest specialty, the Behemoth Burger. Should the officer still insist on giving me a ticket, I would flash my ID badge and tell him to stop fucking with the course of American history.

  After three hours of running stoplights, exceeding the speed limit, and otherwise indulging in deplorable citizenship, I pulled up before the Château Mojave, parking between Whale’s Rolls Royce and Joy’s convertible. Admiral Yordan’s chauffeur was pacing around the staff car, treading a circular furrow in the sand. Four other sailors stood at attention beside the canopied troop transport, ready to deliver Gorgantis to Hangar A. I scrambled out of the Duesenberg, accorded my PRR a quick glance — evidently it had survived the trip without mishap — and dashed into the atelier.

  Eyes greeted me, a baker’s dozen, Yordan being a cyclops, presumably lodged in their owners’ skulls but nevertheless exuding a disembodied quality. Thirteen detached, discrete, extremely angry eyes.

  “I should have you keelhauled!” Yordan screamed.

  “Bad enough you got the lizard’s picture in the paper — but this is outrageous!” Dr. Groelish cried.