The Five Acts of Diego Leon (32 page)

They asked if he heard about what was happening with Jerome Hunt, with the scandal, and his being fired from the film.

“Sure I know,” Diego said. “But what does this have to do with me?”

“I thought and thought and thought,” Perry said, rising now and going to the window. He opened it up; a fresh breeze blew through the stifling room. “And nothing. Then it hit me. Wham!”

“Time is money,” Cage said. “Scrapping the thing is out of the question because we’ve already invested too much. We could hire
another actor to fill the role,” Cage said. “But
that
would take time. We’re on a tight schedule.”

Diego knew what they had in mind. He remained quiet, though, listening as attentively as he could.

“I need someone, an actor who already knows the part, someone who’s already rehearsed the lines,” Perry said.

“We want you to consider performing both.” Cage said.

“You speak
both
languages,” said Perry. “I think you can do this. It’s a very unique opportunity.”

Cage said, short of canning the film, there was no other way. Recasting an entirely new actor for the role of Peter, he said, would set them back. They would have to conduct a search, the actor would have to memorize the story, the lines. “Frontier needs you,” Bill said.

“Jacques, Fay, and Margaret will carry the film,” Dalton Perry said.

“You’ll just be along to play support,” Bill added.

“Most of the character’s role in the film requires that he lie in bed, semiconscious, after the countess bites him anyway,” stressed Dalton.

“Plus, think of the exposure. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?” asked Bill.

“And Salazar?” Diego asked.

“I’ll speak with him and, with some cooperation, we’ll swing it,” Perry said. “We can do this, but we need to know if you’re on board. It’ll be a lot of work, a lot of readjusting.”

Bill said, “It’s all riding on you. We need to know if you’re committed today. Before we all walk out that door. The entire production is resting on this decision.”

He couldn’t say no to Bill, not then. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He replied without hesitation.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll do it. Of course I will.”

The next day, Perry introduced Diego to the English cast. Fay Carmichael, in the role of Mary, and Margaret Dillon, Countess Carmilla, both had large personalities but managed to keep those in line.
They got along quite well, laughing and joking with one another. Margaret Dillon was tall and statuesque, with fine features and a smooth complexion. She was definitely giving a very different take on the character than Veronica Flores, who had won the part in the Spanish version. Dillon was too overpowering in the role, Diego thought, and her personality acted to blunt the mystique and allure the countess needed to possess. Flores, though smaller and more energetic, could easily slip into the character’s skin, transforming herself into the evil vixen in an uncanny way. Fay Carmichael was right for the part of Mary, for the actress had a very stern, very focused, and versatile way about her. She inherently possessed the bold and assertive attitude Mary had, especially once Doctor Von Karnston is introduced and she aids him in the investigation regarding her husband’s illness and the strange puncture wounds on his chest. In the role of Lucretius Von Karnston, the eccentric doctor and professor of the occult and the dark arts, Jacques Fantin, a Frenchman and one of the studio’s cadres of actors discovered by Cage, had been cast. Fantin’s star had fizzled out at some point during its initial birth, and he was reduced to acting in less known, weaker films such as
Alarm
and
The Liberty Boy
. It was rumored that Frontier Pictures had no intention of renewing his contract after
The Bride of Blood
was completed. Such a promising career had turned into a rather disappointing one as, over and over, Fantin was either horribly miscast or criticized by studio executives when his films failed to bring in any profit. As Diego watched the scene play itself out on the set, he didn’t notice when Jacques sauntered in and stood just a few feet away from him.

Perry looked over, nodded at both of them, and when Jacques noticed that Diego waved at the director, he glanced at him and asked who he was.

“I’m working on the Spanish version of the film,” Diego responded.

“Ah,” Jacques said. “You’re the one who’s going to burn the candle at both ends then, huh?”

“Yes,” he started to say when Perry yelled “Cut!” and summoned both Fay and Margaret over. They and a group of various technicians and stagehands gathered around Jacques and Diego.

“Everyone,” Perry said, holding a clipboard in his hand, “You all know that Diego will be taking over Jerome’s role as of today. He’s performing the part of Peter in the Spanish production. I consulted with Mister Cage, who agreed that, in light of recent problems with the picture, this would be the most logical and speediest solution.”

“This is like something straight out of a movie itself,” said Fay, putting a hand on her hip. “The actor drops out mysteriously and the hopeful apprentice waiting patiently gets his chance.” She laughed and shook her head. “Seriously, some bozo should write this down, turn it into a script or something.” Fay leaned in, gave Diego a pat on the shoulder and said, “Welcome aboard, kid,” then turned and walked to her trailer.

“But does he speak English?” asked Margaret.

“Yes of course,” said Diego. “I speak both.”

“Well, there’s that,” said Margaret. “Fine. Welcome.”

“She likes to think she’s a real bitch,” said Jacques. “Likes playing the whole diva role. But, in all honesty, she’s a pussycat.”

“They’re an interesting bunch,” Diego said to Perry, who was on his way out.

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Perry.

July–October 1932

H
E WAS EXHAUSTED
. I
N BETWEEN PRODUCTIONS, ONCE THE ENGLISH
crew vacated the soundstage and before the Spanish crew came in, he remained there on the set and rested his head for a moment. Diego was tired, so tired, and everything fell silent, and all movement ceased. And he was no longer on a soundstage in Hollywood but at an inn tucked away in the remote town of Corovia in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. And he plunged into that great chasm now, that crack in time, a moment that was neither day nor night but somewhere in between, a gray space, formless, ambiguous. He no longer walked among them, among the living. Diego felt himself separate from his body, his spirit hovering like black mist over his flesh, apart from and not a part of this life. He dreamed of terrifying specters with pale skin and sharp teeth, of hellish beasts with bristly hair and damp snouts and eyes as red as burning embers. He saw crosses and cemeteries—decrepit and decaying—dotting a dark and icy landscape of gnarled trees and derelict buildings, the sharp and thorny peaks of mountains, plains and valleys laid waste by the trampling of thousands of feet, of battles and bombs and guns and pestilence and plague, where nothing grew, no animals grazed. It smelled everywhere. And there was nobody. All the people had left the land, tired of the evil that thwarted good intentions, that made living impossible, unbearable. Inside the churches, plaster
statues of the saints cried tears of blood. And Christ, nailed there to his cross, lifted his head, opened his mouth, and cried out in agony, his screams the screams of thousands, his cry not human at all, but more like an animal’s, a sound so awful it separated the flesh from bone, shook the core, made the hair fall out, laid waste to the body, the soul, the anima.

The sets became real now, no longer props made of wood or foam. He saw the eerie twilight, the dusty, cobwebbed castles and churches, perpetually drafty, the extras in black and somber clothing, the old women with glassy, tear-filled eyes, holding candles, the beads of rosaries laced between arthritic fingers as the funeral procession wound down the narrow and cobblestoned streets of Corovia, the simple coffin hoisted on the shoulders of burly men with somber faces. It was all real, and it filled him with anger, with a rage so strong he could think of only to bring harm, to maim and kill and destroy all the evil, vile, and corrupt of the world, those who prey on the weak and poor, who feed off their blood, who draw strength from their misery, who ruin their lives for generations and generations.

In his dream, he watched as they lowered the casket into the ground. They gathered fistfuls of dirt and threw it down where it mixed with the moist earth the men scooped up with large shovels. The women stood huddled under an oak tree and prayed in hushed and sibilant voices. Children with pale faces and wide eyes ran between the crooked and splintered crosses jutting out from the ground marking the graves of their ancestors. The fake crows sat perched on the iron fence lining the perimeter of the cemetery, and soon they came to life, picking their feathers, squawking incessantly, waiting to feast on the rotting flesh of a field mouse or a beetle. Diego watched the backdrop of steel gray clouds, painted on the taut canvas by an artist in splattered overalls, roll by. He felt the cold wind blowing in from the blades of whirring fans against his skin. He felt the presence of a great, ancient evil watching him, waiting for the right moment to claim him, to devour them all.

They prayed.

They nailed crosses to their doors. They sprinkled holy water in
the dark corners of their houses, where it was said sin festered. They kept their children away from the windows, for the evil roaming the streets could see them and snatch them away.

They prayed.

Yet still she came. Bathed in black. White skin. Sharp teeth. A thirst for blood, human blood. That which kept her alive, preserved. She drew strength from their fear, preyed off this, and the more they cried out, the more they screamed, the more she craved them. And she would come to claim dominion over the land, over the corrupt and immoral souls of the people. He felt his resistance waning and the temptation was too strong, the lust too enticing, the power too erotic, the taste of flesh too hard to resist.

He prayed. Who was he becoming?

Diego prayed.

He woke to the voice of an old man speaking to him in Spanish.

“¡Levantense, joven! Levantense,” said the voice. “Que ya llegan.”

Diego woke now. The old man’s hand on his shoulder, a smile on his face.

“I fell asleep,” he told him in Spanish. “I had an awful dream.”

The old man looked around, regarding the eerie sets—the old cemetery, the dark church, the dark castle, the wooden coffins and crucifixes piercing the ground—and nodded.

“I can see why,” he said.

He slept very little, only a few hours here and there, as they pushed on. Perry was a fine director, though, and never shied away from pulling Diego aside to coach him, provoking him to dig deep inside his own self to bring out emotions he never knew he had to complicate Peter.

“Characters need depth,” he would say. “You must remember what is at stake for this man and why it is so important for him to fight for his life.”

He pushed and nudged Diego along, scolded him kindly when he wasn’t performing a scene just right, when the delivery of lines sounded “wooden,” he’d say, or “overly fraught.” There was a balance that needed striking, he would often comment, between true
emotion and fabricated melodrama. The line between the character and the actor was thin, he said, very thin. Use moments in your own life—heartache, happiness, confusion—to augment and refine the role. Dalt was full of energy, almost maniacal, and would often take his tie and hat off, fling them across the studio, untuck his shirt and run around, exhausting himself, when a scene was performed without a hitch.

“It must be great,” said an actress on the set one day when she stood in line near Diego at the craft service tables. The young woman was broad-shouldered with an angular face and sharp cheekbones. She was dressed as a barmaid, and Diego knew she had a small part in the film. Her scenes mainly involved serving drinks to some of the other characters and occasionally delivering a few lines of dialogue.

“Great?” he asked. “What?”

“Working that closely with a man like Dalton Perry,” said the woman. “I’d kill to be in your shoes.”

“Well, maybe someday you will be able to,” he said. Diego stuck his hand out. “I’m—”

“Oh, I know who you are,” she said, shaking his hand. “It’s an honor, Mister León. I’m Gayle. Gayle Turney.”

A month after the final scenes were shot, the editing of both
The Bride of Blood
and
La novia de sangre
were finally finished, the films ready to be premiered, both in October of 1932. The premiere of
La novia de sangre
was first, and it was held at the California Theatre on South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, one of a handful solely devoted to running Spanish-language films. The initial screening was well attended, with a modest number of publicity reporters and photographers present, standing behind the ropes flanking the red carpet and shouting questions.

“Mr. León, what was it like working on this Spanish film?”

“Mr. León, tell us if you plan on making more movies in your native tongue.”

“Diego, who did you like better? The English-speaking crew or the Spanish?”

He answered each question as Perry and Cage had taught him
to, standing before the flashing bulbs of photographers and waving.
It was a rare opportunity to work on the Spanish film. Everyone on the set was kind and professional. Mr. Salazar was a fine director. There are currently no plans to star in another Spanish-language film. Working with both crews was an equal joy
.

“What do you make of the mass deportations the LAPD is conducting throughout the Mexican neighborhoods in the city?” asked one reporter from
La Opinión
.

“Politics don’t concern me much,” he said, an air of indifference in his voice, and let his thoughts trail off. He continued to smile, continued to wave, as the reporter waited, his microphone a few inches from Diego’s mouth. When in doubt, he had been told to just smile, nod, and wave, then move on. And that’s what he did, leaving the reporter behind, a confused look on his face.