Man's Bela Lugosi fascination leads to 4 books
Maybe it was something in the blood that led Bill Kaffenberger to become the biographer of Bela Lugosi, the man who made Dracula famous.
After all, the grandmother of Kaffenberger, a Los Angeles author, actor and singer, grew up in the same Carpathian Mountain region as Lugosi before she emigrated to America, eventually settling in Lyndora.
“My grandmother, Mary Gajdos, came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from what is now the eastern part of Slovakia,” he said. She emigrated in 1913 to Endicott, N.Y., to work in a shoe factory.She met and married Paul Chernick, an emigre from what is now Belarus, before the couple traveled as Chernick sought work.“Eastern Europeans couldn't get a lot of high-quality jobs,” said Kaffenberger. “There was prejudice against the hunkies, a pejorative word.”He said his grandfather worked in coal mines before eventually getting a job at Armco making railroad wheels and settling in Lyndora, where Kaffenberger still has relatives.His grandmother grew up in the western region of the Carpathians, and Lugosi grew up in the eastern part of the mountain range in what is today Romania.“And, of course, this is the region of the vampire legends. I always found that interesting,” Kaffenberger said.Strangely for a man who coauthored four books on the famed “Dracula” actor, Kaffenberger first saw Lugosi in a non-horror role as a child growing up in Virginia.
“When I was 8 in Arlington, the television station WTTG Channel 5 showed movies in the afternoon,” he said. “It was 'Scared to Death,' a cheesy movie Lugosi made late in his career.“And I'm thinking 'Who is this guy with the fabulous accent and the hypnotic eyes and the hand gestures?'” he said.This began his lifelong fascination with Lugosi, a preoccupation witnessed by his cousin Sharon Chernick of Butler.She remembers visiting her uncle and aunt and cousins in Arlington while she was growing up.“I was about 10 or 11, and visiting with my cousins Paula and Susie. He had posters all over his room of Bela Lugosi and other characters and to me, at 10, those posters were a little scary,” Chernick said.“But the point being is even at that early age, he had a strong interest in the genre and characters,” she said.The interest was only strengthened when Universal Studios released a film package of its old horror movies — Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman — to television as “Shock Theater.”Kaffenberger said he teamed up with Gary Rhodes, whom he called one of the premier film scholars in America, to write four volumes of Bela Legosi's life.The first book appeared in 2012.“We were going to write a book, so now its 12 or so years ago and four books later,” said Kaffenberger.“Gary and I have become, we don't claim it for ourselves, we are the experts on all things Bela Lugosi,” he said.The last book, “No Traveler Returns,” covers Lugosi's years on the vaudeville, spook show and summer theater circuit and his final movies with legendary bad movie director Ed Wood.The books necessitated research trips to Hungary and poring over old newspaper files and theater collections.“They had preserved these old theater playbills, photographs and posters, things over a hundred years old,” he said.Kaffenberger and Rhodes found a lot of information on Lugosi's early years.“It's very fascinating; we had so much information we had to split it into two volumes,” he said.Kaffenberger said what struck him was Lugosi's ability to bounce back from adversity and reinvent himself.In 1900, when he was 18, and working in a locomotive train repair facility, Lugosi decided he wanted to be an actor.Lugosi learned his stagecraft traveling with touring repertory companies of actors, rising in the ranks to become one most well-known actors at Hungary's national theater.He had to leave Hungary after a failed Communist revolution in 1919.Kaffenberger said, “The people he supported turned out to be Communists. When the next government took over they went looking for collaborators. He had to leave Hungary and went to Germany.”“But he realized the only place he was going to make his mark was the United States. He came to America in 1920, settled in New York and started getting parts in Broadway plays,” Kaffenberger said.In 1927, he appeared as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel.He later appeared in the 1931 film Dracula directed by Tod Browning and produced by Universal Pictures.Kaffenberger said from 1931 to 1936 were the glory days for Universal's monsters and Lugosi.But then, the market for horror dried up when the British theaters, which were an important revenue stream for Universal, lost their taste for horror films.Lugosi was basically out of work for two years because nobody thought he could do anything but Dracula and horror characters.
In 1938, his son was born, and he and his wife were running out of money.But then, Kaffenberger said, a California theater owner revived the “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” films as a special double feature.The combination was so successful Universal took notice of the tremendous business the movies were generating and launched its own national re-release of the same two horror favorites. The studio then rehired Lugosi to star in new films first casting him in “Son of Frankenstein” as Ygor, a mad blacksmith with a broken neck, one of his most popular roles.Lugosi continued to make movies between 1939-1946, often working with some of the lesser movie studios.He returned to Universal and only his second on-screen portrayal as Dracula in 1949's “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”Lugosi also worked in vaudeville, summer stock theater and spook shows which were live magic shows that would play movie houses in small towns. Most used old live theater special effects.He even appeared in Western Pennsylvania, Kaffenberger said.Lugosi's live appearances included:Stardust Cavalcade: Bela Lugosi and Ed Sulllivan at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, April 4 to 6, 1940;In the play “Dracula” at the Nixon Theater in Pittsburgh June 14 to 19, 1943;A night club show at the Grey Wolf Tavern in Masury, Ohio, Sept. 20 to 22, 1948, a show heavily advertised in New Castle and drawing an audience from there and from Pittsburgh;A night club show at the Copa Night Club in Pittsburgh Feb. 13 to 18, 1950.Lugosi also made TV and radio appearances but work became scarce for the actor as he aged.Kaffenberger said eventually Lugosi fell into the orbit of director Ed Wood and his Grade Z productions of “Bride of the Monster” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”Lugosi died in 1956 and was buried in one of his vampire capes.The title of the book covering Lugosi's life, “No Traveler Returns,” comes from the Hamlet quote about death “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”Kaffenberger's Lugosi interests have led him to careers as a writer and actor.He's appeared as a background actor in several movies and claims his beard got him hired for Steven Spielberg's production of “Lincoln.”“They set me down next to Tommy Lee Jones,” he said. “I even got one line.”He also got to meet Lugosi's son Bela G. Lugosi twice and Bela Lugosi's granddaughter Lynn.“She runs the family business now that owns the rights to the family name and likeness.”As for Kaffenberger's own family, he hopes to visit his cousins in Lyndora next year.And Chernick has bought her cousin's last two books to donate to the Butler Area Public Library.
