Whitstable (12 page)

Cushing took his coat from the seat next to him and folded it over the one in front. He was hoping the vacant seat would be occupied. Eventually, if not sooner. For now he had best try to endure the sticky smell of popcorn and Kia-Ora embedded in the surroundings.

He put on his white cotton glove and lit a cigarette. Before he’d finished it Russ Conway’s ‘Donkey Serenade’ faded and the house lights went down.

Without the pre-amble of advertisements, often the case in a matinee, sickly green lettering was cast over the rippling curtains as they creaked begrudgingly open. Mis-timed as ever.

An American International/Hammer Films Production.

Ah yes.

Jimmy ringing him in a panic saying AIP were getting cold feet because they’d cast an unknown in the lead, and a Polish girl at that. They’d already had to defend their decision to the Ministry of Labour, for God’s sake: now the Americans had said they’d feel more secure with a “traditional Hammer cast”. And so he’d stepped into the breach at the last minute to save Hammer’s bacon. He could hardly believe that only a year ago he was filming it all on Stage Two and at Moor Park golf course, with Helen waiting for him at home, alive, when they called it a wrap.

He squinted as colour flecked the dark air and dust motes.

Lugubrious Douglas Wilmer’s Baron von Hartog closes the book on his family history. He watches from a high window in the ruined tower of Karnstein castle as an apparition floats around the fog-swathed graveyard below. A phantasm in billowing shroud-cloth, the Evil not yet in human form…

The words of the actor in voice-over blended with the words Cushing recalled dimly from the script.

How the creature, driven by its wretched passion, takes a form by which to attract its victims…

How, compelled by their lust, they court their prey…

“Driven by their inhuman thirst—for blood…”

Cushing shifted in his seat. Why were cinema seats so desperately uncomfortable?

The camera tracks in towards a drunk who has staggered out of a tavern and stands urinating against a wall. His stupid face opens in a lascivious grin. Back inside the tavern, his scream chills the air and everyone freezes in horror—the way Hammer does best. The serving wench runs to the door and opens it to find the drunk with twin punctures in his neck. Lifeless, he falls…

Peter Cushing looked at his watch. Tricky to see in the dark. The merest glint of glass. Hopeless. Hearing the screech of a sword drawn from its scabbard, he lifted his eyes back to the screen.

Douglas Wilmer waits in the chapel for the apparition to return to its grave. As his eyes widen, the camera pans to a diaphanous shroud more like a sexy Carnaby Street nightgown than anything from the nineteenth century, and the naked, voluptuous figure beneath it. The camera rises to the face of a beautiful blonde. She steps closer and wraps her arms around the frightened, mesmerised Baron. When her cleavage presses against the crucifix hanging round his neck she recoils sharply, her lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Close up: bloody fangs bared in a lustrous, female mouth. With a single swipe of his sword he decapitates her. Moments later, her severed head lies bloody on the castle flag stones at his feet. The lush music of Harry Robinson, as romantic as it is eerie, wells up over the title sequence proper…

Still the seat beside Cushing remained empty. He lit a second cigarette. By now he was wondering if he would be sitting through the film alone. Perhaps his attempt to entice the creature hadn’t been as clever as he’d thought.

The pastiche Strauss made him cringe every time. He’d never been impressed by the tatty ballroom scene at the General’s house. The Hammers were always done cheaply—the ingenuity and commitment of cast and crew papering over inadequate budgets—but now they were starting to
look
cheap. It worried and saddened him. Like seeing a fond acquaintance down on their uppers. Byronic Jon Finch looked heroic enough, he had to admit. He didn’t look bad himself as a matter of fact, in that scarlet tunic and medals…

Peter Cushing as the General looks on, presiding over his party. He kisses the hand of the delightful Madeline Smith, bidding her and her father, George Cole, goodbye. Or rather: “Auf wiedersehn.”

Until we meet again. Obviously. The audience knows he will appear later in the picture. He’s one of the stars, after all.

He watched Dawn Addams as the Countess introduce her daughter Mircalla, played with languid hunger by Ingrid Pitt—plucked from her brief appearance in
Where Eagles Dare
after Shirley Eaton (from
Goldfinger
) was deemed too old, even though they were actually the same age. Perhaps Eaton, he thought, simply hadn’t given Jimmy Carreras what he wanted, as Ingrid with her European eroticism undoubtedly had. Poor Ingrid, who’d spent time with her family in a concentration camp—(“concentration camp: that’s true horror”)—and for whom he’d organized a cake and champagne on the anniversary of her father’s birth: Helen had wheeled it onto the set and Ingrid had blown out the candles with tears in her eyes.

Peter Cushing asks the Countess if she would like to join in the waltz. “Enchanted,” comes her reply.

“The invitation to the dance.” A voice in reality: one he recognised all too well.

Without turning his head, he saw the usherette’s torch hovering at the end of his row of seats. A silhouette moved closer, given a flickering penumbra by the fidgeting and then departing beam. The donkey jacket seemed almost to be bristly on the shoulders, like the pelt of some large animal, especially with the long, flesh-coloured hair running over its collar.

Eyes fixed on the screen, Cushing felt the weight of Les Gledhill settle in the cinema seat beside him. He detected the strong whiff of carbolic soap and Brut after shave, a multi-pronged attack to cover the daily tang of blood and gutted fish.

Jon Finch is waltzing with the General’s niece, Laura, and Ingrid—Mircalla—is looking over at them. Laura thinks she is eyeing up her boyfriend but he says no, it’s her she’s looking at. A sinister man enters the ballroom dressed in a black top hat and a red lined cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. He whispers to the Countess, who makes her apologies to the General. She has to go. Someone has died.

Peter Cushing as the General tells her, “It’s my pleasure to look after your daughter, if you so wish.”

Sitting beside him in the auditorium, Gledhill’s face was entirely in darkness.

“Don’t tell me you’ll tear down the curtains and let in the light. You’re not exactly as frisky as you were back in the fifties, are you?”

“I thought you didn’t watch my films.”

“Only when there’s nothing better on. They’re okay for a cheap laugh, I suppose. All they’re good for nowadays.”
The General says goodbye to the Countess and watches her depart in her coach. Ingrid stares out. The pale, cloaked man on horseback in the woods gives a malevolent grin, showing pointed fangs.
“Things have moved on, haven’t you noticed? Blood and gore, all the rest of it. Nobody’s scared of bats and castles and bolts through the neck.”
Mircalla fondly places a laurel on the General’s niece’s head. Puts a friendly arm round the young girl’s bare shoulders.
“They’re just comedy. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore.”

Cushing chose not to point out that
their
Frankenstein’s monster never had bolts through its neck. “I believe I still have a small but devoted following.”

“I can see. We can hardly move for your adoring fans.” The man he spoke to knew as well as he did that they were the only people in the audience. “They’re dying, these old films. Everybody knows it. The last gasp. It’s tragic.”

“I think you’ll find this film has been a box office hit. Significantly so, in fact. It’s rejuvenated the company.”

“Really. Look around you.”

“You’ve got to remember it’s already been released for five months. And this is a backwater town. And a matinee.”

“You’re living an illusion, mate.”

“Am I?”

“You need to get a grip on reality, old feller. Before you lose it completely. Choc ice?”

Cushing imagined it was not a serious inquiry.

Peter Cushing’s beautiful niece is sleeping now. Swooning in some kind of ‘wet dream’—if that was the expression.
He remembered that this was one of the many scenes that Trevelyan and Audrey Field, who had been campaigning against Hammer for decades, were unhappy about, even with an X certificate. The censor had strongly urged the producers to keep the film “within reasonable grounds”—meaning the combination of blood and nudity, the very thing Carreras was gleeful about now they’d entered the seventies (“The gloves are off! We can show anything!”)
. In monochrome a hideous creature crawls up the bed. Wolf-like eyes out of blackness become Ingrid Pitt’s—Mircalla’s.
To Cushing the girl looks as though she has a bearskin rug crawling over her. Nevertheless, the dream orgasm so worrisome to the BBFC is curtailed with her scream.

“You saw the bitch,” Gledhill said in the gloom. “What did she say? You know she’s a liar.”

“There seem to be an extraordinary number of liars in your life, Mr Gledhill.”

Peter Cushing and an elderly housekeeper run in and calm Laura down. They say it was a nightmare, that’s all. He kisses her forehead and they leave the room. They think of checking on Mircalla, but when they knock there is no answer. They presume she’s sleeping. But the bedroom is empty. Ingrid Pitt is outside under moonlight looking up at the window…

“I thought she seemed perfectly charming,” Cushing said, his eyes not straying from the screen. He pretended that it absorbed his attention. “Another woman with another boy who perhaps doesn’t dream of vampires, like Carl, but of another kind of… creature of the night.”

His companion remained silent. He found it uncommonly difficult to deliver the lines he’d prepared in his head.

“She told me you’d invariably take him off to bed, rather than her. That you’d spend time reading him stories, as a doting father should. Quite rightly. Your, ah,
special time
you called it, I believe… I wonder what your son might call it?”

“Now you are starting to bother me, old man.”

“I’m rather glad about that.”

The Doctor, played by reliable old Ferdy Mayne, tells Peter Cushing that his niece just needs some iron to improve her blood. Cut to Ingrid Pitt at the girl’s bedside. Laura tells her she doesn’t want her to leave. Ingrid lowers her head and touches her lips to the girl’s breast…

“What are you going to do? Organize a torchlight parade of peasants to storm up to the Transylvanian castle, beating at the gates?”

Peter Cushing tells a visiting Jon Finch that his niece doesn’t want to see anyone but Mircalla.

For a moment Cushing was taken aback by his own close-up. In spite of the make-up he looked tremendously ill. Of course he knew the reason. It was the toll of Helen’s illness, even then. He could see the strain in his eyes. But it was a shock to see it now, thirty feet across, vast, on display for the entire public to see. He’d been oblivious to it at the time. He’d had other preoccupations. Now it hit him like a blow and it took a second for him to steady his nerve, as he knew he must.

“You think you’re safe because you consider everyone to be as selfish and self-interested as yourself.” Cushing did not look at the other man as he lit another cigarette. A scream rang out: the General’s niece, after another nocturnal visitation. “You really are unable to contemplate that someone might act totally for the benefit of another human being, even though they themselves might suffer. And that’s where you’re misguided, and wrong. That’s precisely your undoing, you see.”

“You obviously know me better than I know myself.”

“We shall see if I do.”

“Shall we?” Mocking even his language now.

Peter Cushing’s niece moans Mircalla’s name in her delirium. He holds her hand. When Mircalla is discovered not in her room, he barks angrily at the maid to find her. Ingrid Pitt glides in, non-plussed, saying she couldn’t sleep and went to the chapel to pray. She tells him bluntly—cruelly—that his niece is dead.

Cushing blew smoke and watched the horror ravaging his own face on celluloid, vividly reliving playing the scene, having to play it by imagining the devastating loss of one you love, and hating himself afterwards for doing so.

He cries out the name of “Laura! Laura!” Jon Finch rushes into the room with Ferdy Mayne, but no sooner has the stethoscope been pressed to her bare chest than the Doctor sees the tell-tale bite mark, accompanied by a glissando of violins…

“Consider this,” Cushing said. “If I talk to the police, yes, they might think I’m a crazy old man, they might think I’m guilty—that is a matter of supreme indifference to me, I assure you. But because of my so-called fame as an actor,
your
name will be in the
News of the World
, too, whether you like it or not. Before long the disreputable hacks will be rooting round in
your
past, talking to
your
wife,
your
past girlfriends,
your
other—yes, I’ll say it—victims. And if some of them, if only one of them speaks… Sue… Your son… And I think they will. I think they’ll
need
to… And, irrespective of what happens to me, you’ll be seen for what you are.”
The General’s keening cries echo plaintively through the house, the camera pans across the graveyard of the Karnsteins…
“And Carl’s mother will know exactly what kind of man she is intending to marry.”

A peasant girl walks through the woods. She hears a cry. It’s only a bird, but it spooks her. She runs. The camera pursues her like a predator through the trees. She drops her basket of apples.

“Have you thought about what
I’m
going to be saying about
you
?” Gledhill said.

“You’re not listening to me. I don’t care.”