Tara’s Reviews > Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration, with a Complete Filmography of Their Films Together > Status Update

Ted Gargano saw Bela’s decay, all too graphically: The last time I saw him, he was really in bad shape. When I delivered the Scotch, he could barely stand. He was in his underwear, and he had, excuse the expression, shit all over his leg. He probably had been asleep and had an accident. He was shaking, and he grabbed the bottle of Scotch, opened it up in front of me and drank half the bottle just like that, [...]

At some point—possibly in 1943, and no later than the summer of 1944—Bela appealed for medication for ulcers. A doctor responded unethically, supplying the aging actor with “medicine” which, in time, would bring Bela Lugosi the most garish and cataclysmic publicity of his life. The doctor gave Bela Lugosi morphine.

Midnight, September 11, 1938: The Victory Theater in Salt Lake City offered Dracula and Frankenstein. The New York Times noted the sensation: The house was sold out by 10 a.m. Four thousand frenzied Mormons milled around outside, finally broke through the police lines, smashed the plate glass box office, bent in the front doors and tore off one of the door checks in their eagerness to get in and be frightened.

With Karloff in the part, the Monster is eloquent even when silent.
—Danny Peary on Bride of Frankenstein, in Guide for the Film Fanatic.

In January of 1956, seven months before he died, Bela went to see a revival of The Black Cat in Los Angeles with [his wife] Hope and some of his teenage boy admirers, and couldn’t contain his joy when he watched his own entrance. “Lugosi screams out,” remembered Hope, “so everybody can turn around and see who he is—‘OH, WHAT A HANDSOME BASTARD I WAS!’”

One night in Hollywood during Yuletide of 1932, as Carroll remembered, Bela lost his cavalier cool: We were walking along Hollywood Boulevard, and in those days, the celebration for Christmas meant that every streetlight was decorated with a circle of lights and tinsel, with a star’s picture inside ... Lugosi looked up—and there, in a circle of lights, was a picture of Boris Karloff. [...]

Over the years, thousands of children wrote, expressing compassion for the great, weird creature who was so abused by its sadistic keeper that it could only respond to violence with violence. These children saw beyond the makeup and really understood.
—Boris Karloff

“I chose Colin Clive for Frankenstein,” said James Whale, “because he had exactly the right kind of tenacity to go through with anything, together with the kind of romantic quality which makes strong men leave civilization to shoot big game....”

James Whale, the director ... was lunching at a nearby table in Universal’s commissary. Suddenly he caught my eye and beckoned me over. I leapt—he was the most important director on the lot. He asked me to sit down. I did, holding my breath, and then he said, “Your face has startling possibilities.” I cast my eyes down modestly and then he said, “I’d like you to test for the Monster in Frankenstein.” [...]

Bela Lugosi’s post–Dracula glow would blaze only briefly, soon doused at Universal by the wolfbane and crucifixes of studio politics and an arrogant “ace” director. In his triumph, Bela could never have foreseen this—nor that a rival, who would soon eclipse him, was on the eve of realizing his own fate and destiny in the Hollywood Hills.