Anno Dracula (4 page)

LORD GODALMING, well dressed, napkin tucked into his starched collar, sits at the table, forking down a double helping of paprika chicken. Harker’s eyes meet Godalming’s, the nobleman looks away.

SEWARD: Harker, help yourself to the fare. It’s uncommonly decent for foreign muck.

HARKER: Thank you, no. I took repast at the inn.

SEWARD: How is the inn? Natives bothering you? Superstitious babushkas, what?

HARKER: I am well in myself.

SEWARD: Splendid... The vampire, Countess Marya Dolingen of Graz. In 1883, you cut off her head and drove a hawthorn stake through her heart, destroying her utterly.

HARKER: I’m not disposed just now to discuss such affairs.

MORRIS: Come on, Jonny-Boy. You have a commendation from the church, a papal decoration. The frothing she-bitch is dead at last. Take the credit.

HARKER: I have no direct knowledge of the individual you mention. And if I did, I reiterate that I would not be disposed to discuss such affairs. Seward and Morris exchange a look as Harker stands impassive. They know they have the right man. Godalming, obviously in command, nods.

Seward clears plates of cold meat from a strong-box that stands on the table. Godalming hands the doctor a key, with which he opens the box. He takes out a woodcut and hands it over to Harker.

The picture is of a knife-nosed mediaeval warrior prince.

SEWARD: That’s Vlad Tepes, called ‘the Impaler’. A good Christian, defender of the faith. Killed a million Turks. Son of the Dragon, they called him. Dracula.

Harker is impressed.

MORRIS: Prince Vlad had Orthodox Church decorations out the ass. Coulda made Metropolitan. But he converted, went over to Rome, turned Candle.

HARKER: Candle?

SEWARD: Roman Catholic.

Harker looks again at the woodcut. In a certain light, it resembles the young Marlon Brando.

Seward walks to a side-table, where an antique dictaphone is set up. He fits a wax cylinder and adjusts the needle-horn.

SEWARD: This is Dracula’s voice. It’s been authenticated.

Seward cranks the dictaphone.

DRACULA’s Voice:
Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to them. What museek they maike!

There is a strange distortion in the recording.

HARKER: What’s that noise in the background?

SEWARD: Wolves, my boy. Dire wolves, to be precise.

DRACULA’s Voice:
To die, to be reallllly dead, that must be... gloriousssss!

MORRIS: Vlad’s well beyond Rome now. He’s up there, in his impenetrable castle, continuing the crusade on his own. He’s got this army of Szgany gypsies, fanatically loyal fucks. They follow his orders, no matter how atrocious, no matter how appalling. You know the score, Jon. Dead babies, drained cattle, defenestrated peasants, impaled grandmothers. He’s god-damned Un-Dead. A fuckin’ monster, boy.

Harker is shocked. He looks again at the woodcut.

SEWARD: The firm would like you to proceed up into the mountains, beyond the Borgo Pass...

HARKER: But that’s Transylvania. We’re not supposed to be in Transylvania.

Godalming looks to the heavens, but continues eating.

SEWARD: ...beyond the Borgo Pass, to Castle Dracula. There, you are to ingratiate yourself by whatever means come to hand into Dracula’s coterie. Then you are to disperse the Count’s household.

HARKER: Disperse?

Godalming puts down his knife and fork.

GODALMING: Disperse with ultimate devotion.

‘What can I say, we made a mistake,’ Francis said, shrugging nervously, trying to seem confident. He had shaved off his beard, superstitiously hoping that would attract more attention than his announcement. ‘I think this is the courageous thing to do, shut down and recast, rather than continue with a frankly unsatisfactory situation.’

Kate did not usually cover show business, but the specialist press stringers (
Variety
,
Screen International, Positif
were dumbstruck enough to convince her it was not standard procedure to fire one’s leading man after two weeks’ work, scrap the footage and get someone else. When Keitel was sent home, the whole carnival ground to a halt and everyone had to sit around while Francis flew back to the States to find a new star.

Someone asked how far over budget
Dracula
was. Francis smiled and waffled about budgets being provisional.

‘No one ever asked how much the Sistine Chapel cost,’ he said, waving a chubby hand. Kate would have bet that while Michelangelo was on his back with the brushes, Pope Julius II never stopped asking how much it cost and when would it be finished.

During the break in shooting, money was pouring down a drain. Fred Roos, the co-producer, had explained to her just how expensive it was to keep a whole company standing by. It was almost more costly than having them work.

Next to Francis at the impromptu press conference in the Bucharest Town Hall was Martin Sheen, the new Jonathan Harker. In his mid-thirties, he seemed much younger, like the lost boy in
The Subject Was Roses.
The actor mumbled generously about the opportunity he was grateful for. Francis beamed like a shorn Santa Claus on a forced diet and opened a bottle of his own wine to toast his new star.

The man from
Variety
asked who would be playing Dracula and Francis froze in mid-pour, sloshing red all over Sheen’s wrist. Kate knew the title role - actually fairly small, thanks to Bram Stoker and screenwriter John Milius - was still on offer to various possibles - Klaus Kinski, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lee.

‘I can confirm Bobby Duvall will play Van Helsing,’ Francis said. ‘And we have Dennis Hopper as Renfield. He’s the one who eats flies.’

‘But who is Dracula?’

Francis swallowed some wine, attempted a cherubic expression, and wagged a finger.

‘I think I’ll let that be a surprise. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I have motion picture history to make.’

As Kate took her room key from the desk, the night manager nagged her in Romanian. When she had first checked in, the door of her room fell off as she opened it. The hotel maintained she did not know her own vampire strength and should pay exorbitantly to have the door replaced. Apparently, the materials were available only at great cost and had to be shipped from Moldavia. She assumed it was a scam they worked on foreigners, especially vampires. The door was made of paper stretched over a straw frame, the hinges were cardboard fixed with drawing pins.

She was pretending not to understand any language in which they tried to ask her for money, but eventually they would hit on English and she’d have to make a scene. Francis, light-hearted as a child at the moment, thought it rather funny and had taken to teasing her about the damn door.

Not tired, but glad to be off the streets after nightfall, she climbed the winding stairs to her room, a cramped triangular attic space. Though barely an inch over five feet tall, she could only stand up straight in the dead centre of the room. A crucifix hung ostentatiously over the bed, a looking glass was propped up on the basin. She thought about taking them down but it was best to let insults pass. In many ways, she preferred the campsite conditions in the mountains. She only needed to sleep every two weeks, and when she was out she was literally dead and didn’t care about clean sheets.

They were all in Bucharest for the moment, as Francis supervised script-readings to ease Sheen into the Harker role. His fellow coach-passengers -Fredric Forrest (Westenra), Sam Bottoms (Murray) and Albert Hall (Swales) - had all been on the project for over a year, and had been through all this before in San Francisco as Francis developed John Milius’s script through improvisation and happy accident. Kate didn’t think she would have liked being a screenwriter. Nothing was ever finished.

She wondered who would end up playing Dracula. Since his brief marriage to Queen Victoria made him officially if embarrassingly a satellite of the British Royal Family, he had rarely been represented in films. However, Lon Chaney had taken the role in the silent
London After Midnight,
which dealt with the court intrigues of the 1880s, and Anton Walbrook played Vlad opposite Anna Neagle in
Victoria the Great
in 1937. Kate, a lifelong theatregoer who had never quite got used to the cinema, remembered Vincent Price and Helen Hayes in
Victoria Regina
in the 1930s.

Aside from a couple of cheap British pictures which didn’t count, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
- the singular mix of documentation and wish-fulfilment that inspired a revolution by showing how Dracula could have been defeated in the early days before his rise to power - had never quite been filmed. Orson Welles produced it on the radio in the 1930s and announced it as his first picture, casting himself as Harker
and
the Count, using first-person camera throughout. RKO Pictures thought it too expensive and convinced him to make
Citizen Kane
instead. Nearly ten years ago, Francis had lured John Milius into writing the first pass at the script by telling him nobody, not even Orson Welles, had ever been able to lick the book.

Francis was still writing and rewriting, stitching together scenes from Milius’s script with new stuff of his own and pages torn straight from the book. Nobody had seen a complete script, and Kate thought one didn’t exist.

How many times did the monster have to die for her to be rid of him? Her whole life had been a dance with Dracula, and he haunted her still. She was not the only one. Geneviève Dieudonné and Penelope Churchward were in the galliard too, drawn in by Dracula and their other persistent ghost, Charles Beauregard. Dracula and Charles had left the floor, but the three vampire women still revolved around their absences, warily friends with each other because of loves and hates they shared.

When Francis killed the Count at the end of the movie - if that was the ending he went with - maybe it would be for the last time. You weren’t truly dead until you’d died in a motion picture. Or at the box office.

The latest word was that the role was on offer to Marlon Brando. She couldn’t see it: Stanley Kowalski and Vito Corleone as Count Dracula. One of the best actors in the world, he’d been one of the worst Napoleons in the movies. Historical characters brought out the ham in him. He was terrible as Fletcher Christian too.

Officially, Kate was still just a technical advisor. Though she had never actually met Dracula during his time in London, she had lived through the period. She had known Stoker, Jonathan Harker, Godalming and the rest. Once, as a warm girl, she had been terrified by Van Helsing’s rages. When Stoker wrote his book and smuggled it out of prison, she had helped with its underground circulation, printing copies on the presses of the
Pall Mall Gazette
and ensuring its distribution despite all attempts at suppression. She wrote the introduction for the 1912 edition that was the first official publication.

Actually, she found herself impressed into a multitude of duties. Francis treated a $20 million (and climbing) movie like a college play and expected everyone to pitch in, despite union rules designed to prevent the crew being treated as slave labour. She found the odd afternoon of sewing costumes or night of set-building welcome distraction.

At first, Francis asked her thousands of questions about points of detail; now he was shooting, he was too wrapped up in his own vision to take advice. If she didn’t find something to do, she’d sit idle. As an employee of Francis’s studio, American Zoetrope, she couldn’t even write articles about the shoot. For once, she was on the inside, knowing but not telling.

She had wanted to write about Romania for the
New Statesman,
but was under orders not to do anything that might jeopardise the co-operation the production needed from the Ceauşescus. So far, she had avoided all the official receptions Nicolae and Elena had hosted for the production. The Premier was known to be an extreme vampire-hater, especially since the stirrings of the Transylvania Movement, and occasionally ordered not-so-discreet purges of the undead.

Kate knew she, like the few other vampires with the
Dracula
crew, was subject to regular checks by the
Securitate
. Men in black leather coats loitered in the corner of her eye.