Bela Lugosi, Part 1

While he's mostly associated with the role of Dracula, Bela Lugosi's early life was significantly affected by WWI, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the transition from silent film to talkies. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Frying and I'm Tracy the Wilson, and I
also have a little cold, so I'm sorry if my
voice sounds not quite right. It's like a magical extra bonus, Tracy,

(00:24):
we don't know you're not from another dimension. Halloween is
coming and we all know that that is my favorite
time of year. And uh so last year we did
a two part episode on Elsa Anchester and the Bride
of Frankenstein and it was super duper fun, certainly for
me because I love her, and we got a raft
of fabulous Halloween costume photos from fans that dresses the bride,
and so I thought it might be fun to take

(00:45):
on another star of the universal horror films this year.
So get out your vampire teeth in your cape and
keep them handy because this is another two parter. Uh.
I will make no secret that I love Todd Browning's Dracula.
Uh there's a newer print of it that incorporates on
modern score, and there's early on when Renfield is headed

(01:06):
up through the mountains, and there's the Philip Glass string
arpeggios playing, and it just sets the scene early in
the film, and it just it literally feels like magic
to me, Like it's part of why I love film
and cinema. It's moody and it's gorgeous and the lighting
is fantastic, and I just I love I love that movie.
Um And while the lead actor is mostly associated with Dracula,

(01:28):
this star Bella Legosi, was so so much more. And
his name, I think when you mentioned it to most
people instantly conjures that image of this dash, dashing, sophisticated
vampire that you know, really helped spark the entire horror
film genre. But in truth, Legosi really lost more than
he gained from playing that role. Even though it made

(01:49):
him very famous in the United States, it also plagued
him in many ways. But additionally, I mean in in
as well as being part of an important part of
film history, his life events kind of link him to
some really interesting historical moments outside of entertainment, including the
fall of the Austro Hungarian monarchy and the transition from

(02:09):
silent film to talkies. His life was tragic in many ways,
but despite all that, his image really endurs is the
epitome of dapper old world charm, and so I wanted
to talk about his life this time around. So I
hope you enjoy it in our Halloween lead up in
the usual way, we will start at the beginning. Lugosi
was actually a stage name. Bella Ferreneck Deadsko Blashko was

(02:33):
born on October two in Lugo's Hungary. Incidentally, this is
only about fifty miles or eighty kilometers away from the
castle that was home to Vlad the Impaler, who is,
you know, the widely sided historical inspiration for a Dracula.
Bela's father was a baker and then a banker, and
these were two professions which just broke with long standing

(02:56):
family tradition. Yeah, his entire family had been farmers for generations,
so it was kind of unique of his father to
strake out into different fields. Uh. And as a child,
Bella attended the local school, but once he reached eleven,
he was sent to what's called the state Gymnasium for
additional education. And that was in and so, just as

(03:17):
a contextual note, while US listeners might associate the word
gymnasium with a sports facility, this was really basically the
equivalent of a preparatory school. The gymnasium did not agree
with young Bella after he started there. About a year later,
he dropped out and ran away. He took odd jobs
to try to make his way and eventually landed in

(03:37):
a small mining town. He continued to work in whatever
jobs would have him, both in the mines and assisting
anyone in the town who needed it. Yeah, he gets
points for being pretty resourceful and resilient. He was just
making his way in the world as a kid, really uh.
And one of the main forms of entertainment that was
available in this mining town, which was called Rosita, was

(04:00):
touring theatrical troops that would visit. And these performers and
their shows just completely enthralled Bella. He is quoted as saying,
they tried to give me little parts in their plays,
but I was so uneducated, so stupid. People just laughed
at me. But I got the taste of the stage.
I got also the rancid taste of humiliation. When he

(04:22):
was fifteen, Bella decided to give education another shot. He
moved to Sobaca, which is in Hungary, and he moved
in with his mother and sister and enrolled in school again,
but it didn't go much better than it did when
he was eleven. He found school not who his liking,
and four months into the program he dropped out and

(04:44):
decided he would go work on the railroad. But his
labor career on the railroad did not last too long either.
His sister, Vilma's husband, knowing that Bella really still had
this love of the stage from when he had encountered
these theater troops when he was younger, managed to get
the young actor accepted into a traveling theater troupe as

(05:05):
just a chorus player, so unlike the little bit parts
that he had had when he was younger, he actually
did really well this time around, and soon he had
moved from the chorus into bigger and bigger parts. He
eventually became the lead actor for the troupe and he
did really well touring Hungary as a young actor. He
was eventually accepted into the Hungarian Academy of Performing Arts

(05:27):
in the early nineteen hundreds, and it was around the
same time as he was focusing primarily on shakespeare studies
as his concentration and touring with with theater groups playing
a lot of really major Shakespearean roles that he kind
of officially dropped the last name blash Goo and started
using Legosi, which is of course a call back to

(05:47):
the town where he was born. He joined Budapest's National
Theater in nineteen thirteen, and he went on to have
a lot of success as a leading man in many
Shakespeare productions and other plays. Before we talk about the
next big chunk of his life, which involves the military service,
Let's take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.

(06:08):
So getting back to the life of Bella Legosi. In
June of nineteen fourteen, so we're talking about World War
One at this point, Lugosi made the decision to take
a leave of absence from his acting career. He wanted
to enlist and fight for Hungary in the war, and
after two years of service, primarily serving on the Serbian
frontier and in Russia, he was discharged for health problems.

(06:30):
If you read some accounts, they say they were mental,
some just leaving his health problems. But in any case,
after his two years of service, he went right back
to work as an actor. Actors with the National Theater
were excused from military service, so the ghostie didn't need
to enlist. Once his military career it had ended in
nineteen sixteen, he was welcomed back to the National Theater

(06:52):
and he started The Passion as Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's
often cited as a really fine performance on a part
that it was one of his great roles in Hungary
and the nineteen teens were also seeing silent film grow
as an industry in Europe, and so Legoci kind of
transitioned his acting career onto film. He was also still

(07:13):
doing theater, but his involvement was not just as an
artist in either area. He also organized a trade union
for film actors in Hungary and this was actually the
first film actors union in the world. And he was
also a founding member of the Free Organization of Theater
Employees in nineteen eighteen. He really envisioned a state runs

(07:35):
socialized theater and his own words quote, the definite aim
of my organizing activity was the raising of the moral,
economic and cultural level of the actors society. This is
a really controversial stance. A lot of members of the
Budapest theater scene demanded that he be removed from the
National Theater. Yeah, they did not want to socialize art. Uh,

(07:58):
you can see where that would be a huge clash
of interest for a lot of people. Uh. But the
Austro Hungarian monarchy collapsed in nineteen eighteen, and in the
shifting political climate, many of Lugosi's colleagues, the same people
who had in many cases been suggesting that he be
removed from his job as an actor, started to agree
that it might be a good idea for them to

(08:18):
band together and find a way to protect themselves and
their rights, and so the entire theater staff actually joined
the Hungarian Civil Service Workers Society in February of nineteen nineteen.
Although as the government continued to stumble in the lead
up to Bellakon eventually seizing control and establishing the Hungarian
Soviet Republic, those same artists broke away from that group

(08:42):
and they formed a new group, which was the National
Trade Union of Actors. When Belakan's Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed
later in n Lugosi, as a trade union organizer was
really on the wrong side of the government. He had
been a known supporter of revolutionary kun which was a
big black mark once the revolution actually fell apart. Yeah,

(09:03):
he was actually barred from acting in Hungary as a
consequence UH, and so he fled to Germany via Vienna,
and there's this great sort of legendary story that he
traveled from Hungary to Vienna hidden in a wheelbarrow underneath
a pile of straw. And he acted in several German
films with pretty moderate success, including an adaptation of Jekyll

(09:24):
and Hyde, which did quite well. Bella was married five
times during his life, and the first was in nineteen
seventeen to a young woman named Ilona Baby's mik Elona
was the daughter of a bank executive and she was
just a teenager when they got married. Her family wasn't
entirely on board with the relationship, both because of the

(09:45):
age gap and because of Lugosia's political stance, but nonetheless
the pair did marry in Budapest on June twenty five,
nineteen seventeen, and at this point Alona was sixteen, Bella
was more than twice her age, thirty four, and the
pair were together through all of the political turmoil that
we just talked about UH in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen.

(10:09):
And Baby was actually allegedly with Bella under that hay
in the wheelbarrow during his escape to Vienna, but life
abroad with her husband worked out to be really frightening
to the young bride. Up until Lugosie's exile, his father
in law had been providing the two of them with
financial support, but once they fled, he'd refused to do
it anymore. She was living as a poor actor's wife,

(10:31):
which was just too daunting a prospect for her, and
she wound up leaving her husband and going back home
to her family. Yeah, keep in mind, she was very young,
she was from a very wealthy family. She had never
known anything really but sort of a life of luxury,
So this was really a huge kind of shock for
her to shift into this kind of life on the run.

(10:52):
Uh and Bella wrote to her. He worked, he saved money,
he planned to send for her once he had amassed
a decent nest day. Like he he wanted to make
this work and make the marriage go forward. But her
family really seemed to see this whole situation as an
opportunity to eradicate what they felt like from the beginning
had been a mistake of a marriage. They allegedly kept

(11:14):
his letters from her. He never received answers from her,
and apparently it was because she didn't know she was
getting any letters from him, and they also told Baby
that Bella would likely be executed if he ever attempted
to return to Hungary, and she had only ever lived
in Budapest her whole life and was not really eager
to live elsewhere. So the family encouraged her to file

(11:35):
for divorce, and she did so eventually, so on July
seventeenth of ninety UH, their brief marriage was legally ended.
Bella was not there for the proceedings, which made things
go super quickly uh and Baby actually remarried almost immediately
to a man that her family had chosen for her.
Decades later, when Lugosi biographer Arthur Lennig interviewed Lugosi's fourth wife, Lillian,

(11:59):
she mentioned Bella had been truly and deeply in love
with Baby, and he had spoken of her to his
later wife and to other people as his one true mate.
He tried to keep in touch with Baby through the years,
and claimed that they even discussed remarrying later on, but
because at that point she had a family and children,
the whole prospect was way too complicated and emotionally difficult

(12:21):
to really seriously consider. Yeah, it's interesting because he had
a reputation as a womanizer, but he really did seem
in his heart to have stayed sort of devoted to
his first wife, which just kind of been an interesting
thing that people don't often talk about. Um and so,
while his film career in Germany was going quite well
at this point, uh once it was apparent that the

(12:44):
marriage was over, Lucosi headed to the US in October
of nine, and so on December of that same year,
he arrived in New Orleans. He actually entered the US illegally,
but he made his way to New York and four
months after his arrived vole in America. He was then
processed officially and legally at Ellis Island in March of nine.

(13:07):
Despite the fact that he spoke little to no English,
although he did speak several other languages, he got fairly
consistent work on the New York stage because of his
stage presence and his acting ability and his skill for
learning all of his lines phonetically. I sort of love this,
and it's one of the things that people have debated

(13:28):
and discussed throughout the years how much of this stayed
the case because he he kind of retained that image
and that story of not speaking terribly get English for
a while, Um, and how much of that was really like, No,
it adds to the drama and the glamour of this
sort of mysterious man who you know, he's just learning

(13:50):
everything phonetically. Whereas other people have said, no, I spoke
with him. He could speak English, not great, but he
could carry on a conversation. So we don't know to
what degree that ended up being true, but at this
stage it really was the case. He really did not
speak much English. Uh. His first English language play was
called The Red Poppy and it debuted in nineteen two,
and that was staged at the Greenwich Village Theater. And

(14:13):
not long after that, just the following year, in nineteen three,
he made his US film debut in the silent film
The Silent Command, And because most films were silent at
this point, uh, the language barrier was not such a
barrier to a film career, and he went on to
appear in nearly a dozen films in the US in
the nineteen twenties, including The Midnight Girl, Prisoners, and The

(14:33):
Veiled Woman. So before we hop on to talk about
his next marriage and also sort of we're edging up
to Dracula time. Do you want to take a word
from our sponsor? Sure to return to the story of
Bella le Ghostie. Not long after he arrived in New York,
he got married again. It's time to Elona von matalk Hit.

(14:54):
The second Elona was a Viennese actress who worked with
the Hungarian theater community that Bella had joined up with
once he made it to New York. Unfortunately, as with
his first marriage, this marriage did not last very long.
His actress wife divorced him on November eleventh, claiming adultery
is the reason for separation. As I said, he had

(15:16):
a reputation as a womanizer. Adult three comes up again
later on as well, And now we're getting to the
medi Dracula part. Yeah. Bram Stoker had always wanted his
novel to be adapted for the stage, but it was
such a sweeping story, with so many locations and such
a huge cast of characters, that most producers did not
want to touch it. Twelve years after the author's death,

(15:40):
the Story of Count Dracula finally made its theatrical debut
in Derby, England in August of ninety four. The critics
not so much with that it was completely panned by
the critics. However, audiences could not get enough of it. Uh.
It also, we should point out, was not all that

(16:00):
similar to the novel that it was based on. It
had to be paired down significantly and edited quite a
bit for logistical reasons and practicality in terms of staging.
But additionally, Bram Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker, had issued the
rights to the play with no stipulations as to how
the work was handled. She really kind of liquidated a
lot of her husband's assets after he died to kind of,

(16:24):
you know, keep money coming in, and she made a
tidy cut from the show, but it didn't seem like
she was particularly attached to retaining the material in any
sort of pristine way. The play started a second run
in London in nine with actor Raymond Huntley starring as
the Count. It got a similar reception to the n

(16:45):
staging critics still hated it, but the ticket sold out
for five full months. An American producer named Horace liver
Right was really eager to reproduce this financial success of
Dracula in the United States, so he got the rights
from Mrs Stoker to stage it on Broadway. And the

(17:05):
initial plan was that they were going to have Raymond
Huntley continue to start in the role as account and
travel to the US and reprised that role. But that
ran into a little bit of a problem. Huntley, perhaps
spurred on by the success of Dracula on the London stage,
would only star in the American adaptation in exchange for
a much larger sum of money than the US producers

(17:26):
could afford. So instead the producer hired an actor who
had European charm acting experience and most importantly, the willingness
to work for less money. That was Bella Legosy. And
at this point Bella had been working in the States
for several years, but he still could not speak English
terribly well, so once again, he learned all of his

(17:49):
lines phonetically. Uh the director had to give him all
of his notes and instructions in French because that was
the language they could both speak, so despite the fact
that the lead actor was really laying his lines in
a language he didn't really know. When the Broadway version
of Dracula opened on October seven, it was a huge success,
and it's success quickly grew, so much so that Universal

(18:11):
Pictures took notice Uh, and now we have another marriage,
and this one is a fabulous, sort of tabloid grade
crazy story. So as Legosi star was on the rise,
he had his own little personal Hollywood scandal. Uh. In nine,
he went married wealthy heiress and widow Beatrice Woodroff Weeks

(18:34):
while he was in San Francisco with a touring production
of Dracula. So the pair had known each other for
some time, but the marriage is always described as whirlwind like.
They seem to have known each other kind of casually
for about a year, although this all happened very quickly,
but two of them were married on July nine, and

(18:55):
they separated just three days later. In divorce testimony, Weeks
said that ghosts Hee had started out delightful but quickly
revealed an angry, temperamental nature. The Ghostie made no claim
two weeks this fortune in the settlement, although it would
have made him a rich man if he had. Yeah,
she had a load of money of her own. She

(19:16):
like we said, she was an heiress, she had family money.
She had also inherited a great deal of money uh
as a widow, and he had legally he had rights
to claim part of it, even though their marriage had
been extremely brief, but he just didn't pursue it. So.
In an interview with the New York Daily Mirror, Weeks
made some allegations that really damaged Legosti's reputation quite a while.

(19:38):
She claimed that Bella had slapped her for eating his
food that he had apparently squirreled away a lamb chop
or something to eat after his late performance, like he
liked to have a midnight lunch and she had eaten
it and he got very angry about it. She also
said he was abusive to the servants as well as
to her. Uh. There were also some suggestions that he
had had a dalliance with Clara Bow. That's mixed into

(20:01):
the scandal, and Legoti and Beau were friends. They spent
a great deal of time together in and they have
been romantically linked, but the nature of their relationship has
never been like super conclusively determined. Uh. We do know
that legos he kept a nude painting that he claimed
was a Bow in his home for the rest of
his life. And we know that Clarabau definitely uh was

(20:23):
a woman who took a lot of lovers. She was
very into living sort of a fast and dramatic life.
So that was sort of his little hiccup in terms
of Hollywood scandal time. And now so he's been playing
Dracula on the stage. Universal is interested, and that's where
we are going to Cliff hang this one, and you'll

(20:45):
have to wait for part two to find out how
the rest of it plays out in his later career.
But you don't have to wait for a listener mail, right, No,
I have that. I totally have that. Uh. This listener
mail is from our listener, Sarah, and she says, Dear
Holly and Tracy. I started thing to your podcast a
little over a year ago after hearing the guys on
stuff you should know plug it numerous times, and now

(21:05):
I enjoy listening to you every Monday and Wednesday while
I'm working out. I especially appreciate your efforts to discuss
groups often overlooked in traditional history courses, namely women and minorities.
I was especially interested in your recent episode on the
Heathen School. As part of obtaining my master's degree in English,
I wrote a thesis on interracial romance in the works
of Native American author Sherman Alexei. In order to do this,

(21:28):
I had to do a considerable amount of research on historical,
cultural attitudes and incidents surrounding the marriage of Elia's Boudineau
and a Harriet Gold In my thesis uh to catch
anyone up that maybe didn't listen to that one or
doesn't remember they that was one of the couples that
we mentioned in the Heathen School episode. Over the course
of conducting this research, I discovered that White Americans have
historically been much more accepting of interracial relationships that involved

(21:52):
white men and Native American women than have relationships that
involved Native American men and white women. The reasons for
this are manifold and bound by both racism and imperialism.
From the time of Pocahonas to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson,
intermarriage between whites and Native Americans was seen as a
means of assimilar assimilating and civilizing the Native population. In

(22:13):
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was typical for
white fur traders, always men and usually among the first
whites to venture into what is now the western US
and Canada, to take Native American wives to handle cooking, mending,
in general homemaking tasks that the men at the time
typically would not perform. It was also, sadly not uncommon
for these white fur traders to abandon their Native wives

(22:35):
when they retired from fur trading and headed back east.
These marriages were viewed favorably by both the fur trading
companies and the Young U. S Government, as they represented
a civilizing movement of whites into native populations and the
white acquisition of Native lands. They also occurred conveniently out
of sight of the general white population. White women didn't
become a factor until later in the nineteenth century, when

(22:57):
pioneer women began moving west, after the Indie and Removal
Act under President Andrew Jackson, and after the pseudoscience of
the time began classifying people of different races as different species.
Before Native Americans had just been unlearned white people with
really good hands. But they did, i'm uh paraphrasing a
little bit. They did get classified later as a different species,
which is a whole other creepy thing to talk about.

(23:20):
But the westward movement of white women meant that they
now had increased opportunities to come into contact with Native
American men, and when such relationships and marriages, though few
in number, began to take place, they were met with
the kind of public reaction Budino and Gold experienced. A
white man taking position of a Native woman was an
acceptable part of the North American conquest, but for a
Native American man to take a white wife was to

(23:42):
reverse this conquest, and that was unallowable. It is at
this point in American history that we see numerous states
passing laws that specifically banned marriages between Native Americans and whites.
As you can probably imagine, this topic fascinated me so
much that my thesis ended up being three times as
long as it was supposed to be, much to this
chagrin of Mike. I hope you enjoyed this tangent on
the Heathen School episode. We absolutely did. Thank you so much, Sarah.

(24:05):
That's one of those things, um uh, I think like
I was aware of, but my brain didn't think, Oh,
I should flush this out for people. So I'm glad
you did because it does clarify kind of why that
was such a problem. When we have talked about some
of those other uh marriages with a white man and
a Native American woman on previous episodes, and those haven't
been quite so much a problem. So we always loved

(24:28):
here additional research expertise from our listeners. So if you
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(24:51):
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(25:13):
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