THE CHISELER

At age 13, I read Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch Queen, alone, as the sun was going down. Rohmer positioned himself somewhere between mystery and horror at a time (early 20th century) when malevolent detail was slathered on with a trowel. He did a damned good job of it in this novel of an Egyptian mummy’s child wreaking mayhem in the modern world. When my parents returned, I was seated where they’d left me, too petrified to move. Nothing’s ever hit me quite so viscerally since.

The closest of later years was Maddie’s death in Twin Peaks. We’d just learned that Leland, infested with the rank evil of  “Bob,” had killed his daughter during a night of sexual explosion. Now, in a horrible whirlwind of viciousness, he smashes her lookalike cousin Maddie. Not only did David Lynch, a greater master of detail than Rohmer, present a gut-wrenching visual terror, but it was enacted against the one wholly innocent person in this town of intertwined meanness and deception. It took me two years to gear up the courage to watch the rerun, and it still felt like a personal assault.

Around the same time I was absorbed by the slowly enveloping darkness of Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor. Few authors can capture the past with such perfect evocation as Ackroyd, in both his fiction and his biographies. But to my mind, he too often displays a sense of archness and lookit-me behind the surface that undercuts the story. Not with Hawksmoor.

The merger of the character of a modern detective, investigating a series of murders in or near London churches, with that of an early 18th century architect involved in ritual sacrifice is another tale of destroyed innocence, but at a brutally measured pace. The modern Hawksmoor’s soul is devoured by – more correctly, dissolved into – a timeless evil that he never clearly comprehends. This novel made me sweat.

It’s that kind of psychological terror that grips me these days. Rereading Rohmer recently was fun, but there was nothing left for me of the original boogeyman shivers. (I know – it never pays to revisit ancient iconic terrors.) Instead, I’m taken with offbeat stories only tangentially categorized as horror that leave me with a lingering, sad unease.

(I’ve lost all taste for the over-the-top word-piling of writers like H.P. Lovecraft. Avram Davidson did a wonderful essay – or review–  debunking him, noting, among other things, that with Lovecraft, “evil always smells bad.”)

One story that hit me was Nancy Holder’s 1993 “Crash Cart.” It follows a hospital resident’s escalating sexual fascination with a woman in critical condition and concludes with the peculiar error on which it’s all based. (Holder has written a bunch of “Buffy” novelizations and nothing else I’ve run across that matches this wonderful story suffused with spiritual ick.)

Another is “Domovoi” by M.K. Hobson (2005). A self-satisfied redeveloper buys a decrepit building where he encounters an equally decrepit woman whose dissolution calls to and envelopes him. She becomes his mate, but as the structure revitalizes, she turns glossy and empty, for she is the spirit of the building and changes with it. When he sees that he has lost the only significant thing in his shallow life, he does what is necessary to regain it, though it means the end of his career. It may be a perfectly told story.

Steve Rasnic Tem doesn’t write that many short stories that I’m aware of, but they always carry an unsettling element that lingers. One phrase of his that’s stuck with me: “bodies piled like cordwood.”

Somewhere in all this is the lesson we all learn about the gains and losses of aging. I’ve lost the ability to react to great gobs of gruesome gore, but I’ve gained a love of the scaly literary oblique. It’s something of a tossup.

by Derek Davis

In the prologue to James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley, sitting and sewing as Byron (Gavin Gordon) and her husband Percy (Douglas Walton) look on. “She is an angel,” Byron says, and Mary rejoins, “You think so?” with a devilish smile. There is a storm going on outside. “You know how lightning alarms me,” she purrs, humorously, for Mary, like Lanchester herself, loves nothing more than a storm. Lanchester, with her Gothic, serrated prettiness, plays this prologue poised on the very edge of camp. “It’s a perfect night for mystery and horror,” she says. “The air itself is filled with monsters.”

“She’s alive! Alive!” cries Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein at the end of this classic horror film, with all of its allegorical insights into being an outsider and all of its stylish humor. We see the Bride’s eyes first in close-up, and when her bandages are taken off, Lanchester stands before us in a flowing white gown with her wavy hair sticking up on end. Does the fabulously queeny Dr. Pretorious (Ernest Thesiger) tease the Bride’s hair like this for her?

Universal make-up artist Jack Pierce styled Lanchester for the role and said that he was inspired by images of Nefertiti, though the skunk stripe of white streaked through the Bride’s hairdo was his own inspiration. Lanchester’s own hair was set in a marcel wave and then combed up over a wire frame, which took a while. The terminally caustic Lanchester was bemused by Pierce: “He really did feel that he made these people, like he was a god,” she said. “In the morning he’d be dressed in white as if he were in hospital to perform an operation.”

The Bride looks around jerkily to the side and then up so that we can see the scars on her jaw. Aided by Whale’s moody lighting, Lanchester really does seem like a newborn creature swooning and swaying to all the stimuli around her. The Monster (Boris Karloff) approaches her and asks, “Friend?” and the Bride hisses and then screams (Lanchester said that she patterned the sounds she made in this scene after the hissing of swans). The Monster gently touches The Bride’s hand and she screams again. “She hate me,” he concludes. “Like others.” And so, with a tear on his face, he blows them up.

Why does The Bride reject The Monster so violently? It cannot just be fear. The Monster reaches out to her with real delicacy and vulnerability. There’s something in The Bride that makes her reject him, a streak of cruelty like that streak of white in her hair, and this relates directly back to the very vivid and particular actress who was playing her and giving her life. Lanchester is only on screen for ten minutes or so in The Bride of Frankenstein, but it is enough to seal her immortality.

Lanchester came from a free-living Socialist family and studied with Isadora Duncan as a girl. She was scathing about Isadora in later interviews, but this was a woman who was scathing about practically everyone. She became a cabaret star at the Cave of Harmony nightclub in London, singing ditties like “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” and “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m Living in Sin.” Sporting kinky and flame-red hair, Lanchester moved in bohemian circles and she herself lived in sin with Charles Laughton for two years before they were married. She performed in several avant-garde shorts with titles like The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama (1925), and Laughton appeared with her in the H.G. Wells-scripted short Daydreams (1928).

Laughton and Lanchester were a match of opposites, and they made a kind of sense as a couple at the beginning of their union, but he was homosexual, which Lanchester discovered soon after they were married. He was also coming into his own as perhaps the finest actor of his time, which meant that she was always in his shadow even though she had deep, if eccentric, talents of her own. Lanchester stayed married to Laughton until he died in 1962, and she paid a steep price for it, as did he. She was trapped or stuck, always under his thumb professionally, and her frustration at that meant that she could be verbally cruel to him, but Laughton was a masochist who seemed to need the many pins she stuck in him to create his best work as an actor. She found herself unable to leave him. Whenever he spoke of divorce, it was Lanchester who defended their odd marriage and sought to keep it going.

Lanchester worked with Laughton throughout her life, with varying results. She’s hilarious as Anne of Cleves in his Oscar-winner The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), where she does a shamelessly broad German accent and grabs any laugh she can find. When Laughton went to Hollywood, Lanchester made do with small parts in David Copperfield (1935) and Naughty Marietta (1935), where she went in for rather heavy bitchery as Frank Morgan’s wife. Her Bride was certainly a success, but it was such extreme work that it led nowhere—she had been too weird in the part, too scary and sexually offbeat for easy casting. Lanchester has little more than a bit in The Ghost Goes West (1935), but then she proved that she could play a radiantly sweet and simple girl in Rembrandt (1936) opposite Laughton. Her Hendrickje is an ideal partner and helpmate to Rembrandt, and her performance here was proof, if any was needed, that she could act something very far from herself.

In her autobiography, Lanchester wrote that producer Alexander Korda had offered her a lead role in a film that she actually started shooting before Korda dropped it when he got Laughton for the lead in Rembrandt, and this sort of professional humiliation did nothing to shore up Lanchester’s increasingly fragile ego.  Korda admitted grudgingly that she had done well with her own part in Rembrandt, but no one else seemed to care or notice that her very unusual talent was falling by the wayside while her husband took one plum part after another and made large meals of them.

She got to do a lead opposite Laughton in Vessel of Wrath (also known as The Beachcomber, 1938), where she plays a prudish missionary, but Laughton and Lanchester usually don’t have much real chemistry in their on-screen work. She does her thing (usually outrageous comedy in fast strokes) and he does his (tirelessly labored-over and seriously layered character work), and they don’t mix very well; it’s as if there is a wall up between them. In their relations in movies, he’s usually in charge and naughty while she is censorious but powerless, and surely she would have preferred to be the naughty one herself. At the end of Vessel of Wrath, Laughton slaps Lanchester lightly on the face, and it’s presumably meant to be affectionate, but it feels more like a glimpse of their frustration with each other.

Lanchester played character roles throughout the 1940s, and her films treat her like a spicy side dish that might make you sick if you have too much of it. She was asked to be just nice sometimes, as in Come to the Stable (1949), but she’s much more useful as a fly in the ointment, a weirdo, a bitch or a witch, a fairy or an imp. On stage in the 1930s, she had played Peter Pan and Ariel in The Tempest with Laughton, and surely she would have made a perfect Puck, too. Her instincts were for the fantastical and the non-realistic, but she was also capable of realistic nastiness, as in her superb performance as a seedy and avaricious landlady in Mystery Street (1950), a film that allows her to spread her wings and steal the show with work that would have met even Laughton’s exacting artistic standards.

Lanchester played a cheery, chattering nurse to Laughton in Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a film where Laughton’s gibes at her feel heavy-spirited rather than funny. She made for a childlike witch in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and then retired to take care of Laughton until he died. As an older and less inhibited man, he had his boyfriends, and they often fought bitterly. “Her chief means of communication was raillery,” wrote Simon Callow in his biography of Laughton. “Tremendous fun if you were sure of yourself and in the mood, but apt to make you feel put down, sent up, and finally pissed-off, if you weren’t…she was like the little bird who lives on the hippopotamus, except that instead of ridding him of insects, she was now drawing blood.”

After Laughton died, Lanchester did some more character parts in films, but she was most comfortable doing her cabaret act at the Turnabout Theatre in Los Angeles, for she was a performer who liked the reassurance of instant live audience laughter. She wrote a candid and amusing memoir called Elsa Lanchester Herself and was a popular talk show guest until her death in 1986.

In the 1998 film of Christopher Bram’s novel Gods and Monsters, Rosalind Ayres played Lanchester with just the right touch of wary asperity. Lanchester’s Bride remains one of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. No doubt her career might have been different in a different time and without the strain of her marriage, but there is a certain poetic justice in the fact that Lanchester will always be remembered for playing a creature who rejects someone else out of hand, a creature who takes power when none has been given her, a bride who has other ideas for herself.

by Dan Callahan

In April, 1969, Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan indicted twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party for conspiracy to bomb commercial and municipal sites.  Covert NYPD officers recorded conversations at Panther headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Harlem that included plots against Macy’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.  The New York Times highlighted the arrest of Robert S. Collier, who had previously spent two years in federal prison for a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

The resulting trial of the “Panther 21” included eleven men one woman, Joan Victoria Bird, a sophomore at Bronx Community College with a previous charge of the attempted murder of two policemen.  The prosecution of the “Panther 21” followed the pop numeroclature of high-profile radical trials, echoing the “Hollywood Ten,” the “Chicago 7,” “Camden 28,” “Wilmington 10,” the “Charlotte 3.”  Several of the Panther 21 were implicated in bombings of police stations in Harlem and the Bronx, and for training members in the paramilitary counterventions of urban race war.    

Fistfights broke out in the courtroom.  Defendant Richard Moore, who later took the name Dhoruba bin Wada, described his “head dribbled on the floor like a basketball” by court officers.  Judge John M. Murtagh, who bore an ongoing outlash of verbal abuse, castigated the defense attorneys for lack of discipline. 

On February 21, 1970, three gasoline bombs exploded outside the Inwood home of Judge Murtagh.  The family was not injured, and Murtagh’s son would later describe how the snowman he had built on the front lawn was used to douse the flames.   

The trial was covered in the New York Times by Edith Evans Asbury, born in Ohio, a working newswoman since 1929 who once interviewed Amelia Earhart.  Edith married Herbert Asbury, famous as the author of folkxploitation gospel Gangs of New York (1928), where snafflers like Hoggy Walsh and Baboon Connolly slung barking irons and jacked-out the frogs in blue, and Chief Big Bill Devery stormed race riots in old San Juan Hill.

In the late 1950s Edith covered desegregation in southern States, and in the 1960s inked numerous stories on city discrimination in labor, housing and the medical industry. 

The “Panther 21” jury included five African-Americans and one Puerto Rican juror.  An editor at McGraw-Hill and a postal clerk spoke to the press about the lack of evidence.  The 13 defendants were acquitted, and Edith Evans Asbury described the eight-month trial as the longest in the history of the State Supreme Court.

D.A. Frank Hogan had been in office since 1942, and described the job as “part lawyer, part policeman, part accountant, part investigator, part prosecutor, part defender of the innocent, part youth counselor and part community adviser.” 

Six days after the verdict, a Ford Maverick was pursued down Riverside Drive by two NYPD officers assigned to watchdog the apartment house of D.A. Hogan.  Pulling up to the Maverick, Officers Curry and Binetti were ambushed by a salvo of machine-gun fire.  The officers survived while the gunmen sped off.   

The next morning, the license plate of the getaway Maverick, wrapped in the pages of the New York Post, was delivered to the New York Times and radio station WLIB, widely tuned in by black communities and in the 1950s broadcast from headquarters at the Hotel Theresa on 125^th Street. 

The package included a manifesto by the Black Liberation Army.  “We are revolutionary justice,” it read, aligning the BLA with “Third World Peoples” and “the tradition of Malcolm.”  As the Vietnamese Liberation Army fought “fascist Marines” overseas, comparably “the armed goons of the racist government” in America “will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army.” 

The shootings had strategically occurred on the birthday of Malcolm X, who in his 1964 “Ballot and the Bullet” speech orated that “we will work with anybody, anywhere, at any time, who is genuinely interested in tackling the problem head-on, nonviolently as long as the enemy is nonviolent, but violent when the enemy gets violent.”  Later that month Malcolm would visit Mecca, and write in his journal that he was “not conscious of color for the first time in my life,” and that “whites don’t seem white.” He changed his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, yet split from the Nation of Islam to found the Organization of Afro-American Unity.  Ironically, it was after Shabazz returned from his trip to Mecca that he insinuated nonviolent principles into his rhetoric, while BLA members adopted Muslim names as a sign of deeper devotion to militant recourse.  Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted for the assassination of Shabazz at the Audubon Ballroom in 1965, yet only one admitted to participation in the killing. 

The BLA took credit the following day in similar cryptic fashion for the murder of NYPD Patrolmen Jones and Piagentini at the Colonial Park Housing Project in Harlem.  Piagentini, a white cop, was shot point-blank with his own service revolver.  The Bronx funeral for Waverly Jones, a black cop, shot in the back, was attended by 5,000 cops from 45 cities.

The BLA robbed banks and assaulted cops as acts of freedom-fighting, as in the 1973 shotgunning of a San Francisco police station, and a shootout with St. Louis cops who retrieved from the assailants the NYPD service weapon of either Rocco Laurie or Gregory Foster, New York cops murdered in 1971 by reputed BLA members.  The spate of violence against cops by black nationalist groups prompted P.B.A. President Edward Kiernan to warn that the NYPD “are men involved in a combat situation.”

In a rare conjoining of political interests, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon met on May 26, 1971, a day after the Officer Jones funeral, to discuss the law enforcement of black nationalist crimes.  Hoover had initiated numerous clandestine, racially-targeted investigative files, as in the infamous COINTELPRO program, which sought to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black nationalist “hate-type organizations.”  Nixon, like Hoover, was paranoid, but his second-term downfall in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal was orchestrated by FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt, who essentially carried out the anti-Nixon bidding of the recently deceased Director. 

At the President’s suggestion, the Director created a secret liaison program between the FBI and the NYPD, called OPERATION NEWKILL—an abbreviation of “New York Police Killings.”  While copies of NEWKILL FBI files have subsequently been obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, at the time a core demand of the program was that any involvement of the FBI would be confidential.  Sanctioned by the President and known only to top NYPD officials, NEWKILL zeroed in the activities of the Black Liberation Army.

As a parallel remembrance of OPERATION NEWKILL, a similar secret intelligence program was devised between the NYPD and the CIA after the 9/11 attacks, to monitor local Muslim groups and liberal political organizations by undercover officers known in NYPD parlance as “rakers.”  Though the existence of the program is presently denied by the blue brass, the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its detailed series exposing the “extraordinary collaboration that at times troubled some senior CIA officials and may have stretched the bounds of how the CIA is legally allowed to operate in the United States.” 

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