Chapter 23

Genius in Angora

Ed Wood—Los Angeles

The entertainment world has never had a shortage of individuals whose ambition is greater than their talent, but few have been as well documented as writer, director, producer, and actor Ed Wood, Jr.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Ed Jr. saw Bela Lugosi in the movie Dracula when he was seven years old and was forever hooked on scary movies. Young Ed received his first movie camera for his eleventh birthday, and he started shooting movies in his backyard with his friends and classmates.

After graduating from high school, Wood quit his job as a movie usher and joined the United States Marine Corps at the start of World War II. He fought in the bloody Battle of Tarawa, coming in on the second wave of amphibious landing craft. The first wave had been almost entirely wiped out. Wood saw his share of combat, and in one vicious skirmish engaged in hand-to-hand combat, got bayoneted, and lost his front teeth to a Japanese rifle butt. Wood killed the soldier in his foxhole. After he recovered from his wounds, he was transferred to underwater reconnaissance and sabotage. What the military brass didn’t know was that their highly decorated Marine always wore ladies’ undergarments.

After the war, Wood attended college for a short time and then found himself working with a traveling circus. Fascinated by the carnies and freaks, Ed took any job that was open, including the half-man-half-woman and the geek. A circus geek is one of the lowest entrées into show business, yet Wood’s desire to be in the entertainment world was so strong that he would bite the heads off of live rats in front of a paying crowd. He felt at home with the circus people, who aren’t exactly known for being socially discriminating.

Wood ended up in Hollywood in 1947 with optimism in his step, and soon found himself performing in local plays and appearing as an extra in movies. His buoyant personality and big talk attracted a group of actors, some green, others on the downslide of their careers. Despite his obsession with angora sweaters and penchant for wearing women’s clothing, Ed had a thing for the ladies, and the ladies found him hard to resist. Frequenting Hollywood hot spots like the Brown Derby and Ciro’s, where he rubbed elbows with real movie stars, Wood started to collect an entourage of freaks, weirdos, and even some real actors, like John Agar, John Carradine, and Kenn Duncan.

In 1951, Wood joined the Screen Actors Guild and began directing a television drama called The Sun Was Setting, which he also wrote. He met his idol, Bela Lugosi, and started a friendship with the Hungarian-born actor that would last until Lugosi’s death. Lugosi, once the most popular box office draw in America, was a morphine addict who became a pariah in the film world. Also around this time, Wood married his first wife, but the marriage was short-lived. She could not handle her husband’s fetish for wearing women’s clothing, and she kicked Wood out on their wedding night.

With two directing credits on his résumé, and Bela Lugosi as a name to drop to investors, Wood found writer, actor, and producer George Weiss to produce his first film, Glen or Glenda. Weiss sold the film to distributors before a single line was written.

Glen or Glenda was planned as an exploitation film from the start. Making the headlines of newspapers all over the world in 1952 was World War II veteran George Jorgensen, who underwent the first sex reassignment surgery and became Christine Jorgensen.

The movie starred a drug-addicted Bela Lugosi as the scientist, Lyle Talbot, and Wood’s current beautiful and blonde girlfriend Dolores Fuller. Ed Wood played Glen and Glenda. Fuller, who would make Jailbait and Bride of the Monster with Wood, went on to become a successful songwriter, penning songs for Elvis Presley, Shelley Fabares, and Nat King Cole.

Glen or Glenda is a bizarre mix of documentary style exploitation, with a mad scientist (Lugosi) in his laboratory playing God; Glen, a tormented man who wishes he were female (Wood); Glen’s confused girlfriend (Fuller); and a police detective (Talbot) who goes to Lugosi to get some understanding about a dead transvestite case he is working on. Glen tries to find a happy balance in his tormented life and does so toward the end of the film, when Fuller’s character enthusiastically removes her angora sweater and hands it to Glen, who beams with happiness. The film is filled with hammy acting and bad direction, interspersed with scenes of mild bondage and stock footage of stampeding buffalo that come out of nowhere. While Glen or Glenda was sold as an exploitation film to be shown at drive-ins and second-rate theaters, it did have a positive message about cross-dressing and alternative lifestyles that most of the other exploitation flicks of that era did not have.

Wood next directed and filmed Jailbait, an interesting crime film with a great plot twist. Jailbait is technically Wood’s best film, but the cheap sets and bad acting overpower the story, making it an entertainingly laughable film. Wood always worked on the cheap and rarely shot more than one take on any of his films. Wood let his actors improvise, but, unfortunately, none of his actors were any good at improvising. Wood had zero business sense, paying his actors and technicians in crumpled bills and promising more percentage of the profits than was mathematically possible. Production started or stopped depending on how long the money lasted. This was the business plan Wood used throughout his career.

During the next four years, Wood worked on an astonishing seven film projects, as either writer or director. They offered the same low-budget exploitation fare, yet Wood was living his dream. His stable of stars included Lugosi, Fuller, Duke Moore, Conrad Brooks, and former Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson. The films had ingenious titles, like Bride of the Monster, The Violent Years, The Astounding She-Monster, Final Curtain, The Night the Banshee Cried, The Bride and the Beast, and Night of the Ghoul. Most of these films were billed under different names, depending on the region and the distributor.

Although Wood’s films seemed to be slapped together without much forethought, there was always a script of some kind, even if Wood had written it in a mere four hours. His scripts always had an outrageous quality to them, whether it was a gang of teenage juvenile delinquent girls raping a man off camera or a woman falling in love with her husband’s pet gorilla.

Wood was able to convince his landlord, a Baptist minister, to financially back his greatest feature, Plan 9 from Outer Space. The Baptist Church of Beverly Hills wanted to make religious films, and church officers came to the conclusion that they could put money into a quickie exploitation film and make a fast buck to finance their main projects. The church insisted that, before any money was given to Wood, his entire entourage had to be baptized. This being the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills, the ceremony took place in a swimming pool.

Using two scenes of Bela Lugosi shortly before he died in 1955, Wood was able to staple together what is generally accepted as the worst film ever made. Originally called Grave Robbers from Outer Space, its title was changed by its distributor, Hal Roach Distributing Corporation, to the more spectacular-sounding Plan 9 from Outer Space.

The movie starred former wrestler Tor Johnson; TV horror hostess Maila Nurmi, known as Vampira; washed-up movie stars Tom Keene and Lyle Talbot; San Francisco radio announcer Dudley Manlove; psychic-to-the-stars, The Amazing Criswell, as the narrator; and child molester and trust-fund homosexual John “Bunny” Breckinridge as the most effeminate alien leader in film history. The movie has shockingly bad dialog, laughable special effects, and props that fall over. Random stock footage, along with lighting and continuity problems, intertwined with bad acting to help the movie through its slow parts, but it is not without purposeful humor. The message of the film is that humans are stupid and should quit building weapons of mass destruction.

Production on Plan 9 from Outer Space was the usual on-again, off-again method that Wood had used throughout his career, and he again paid his actors and crew in crumpled bills and IOUs. Wood was drunk throughout the filming and rarely shot more than one take of each scene. The film played drive-ins and small towns for four years after it was made.

Wood began the downward spiral that most alcoholics tumble down after years of late nights and rowdy parties. The notorious skirt-wearing, skirt-chasing Ed Wood tied the knot with Kathy O’Hara Everett, a foul-mouthed drunk from Canada. Ed and Kathy would get drunk and argue for hours, often resulting in physical fights.

The couple lived in a seedy apartment at Yucca and Cahuenga, which in the 1970s was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Hollywood. As Wood got older and more alcoholic, he tended to stay in drag all of the time, which made him an easy target for the neighborhood’s criminal element. Wood made more movies, but they got in the way of his drinking; to pay the rent, he made pornographic film loops and wrote pulp fiction books for a hundred dollars a pop. Wood knocked out dozens of sensational sex-filled books for the reading public. He could sit in front of a blaring television, cigarette in mouth, whiskey next to him, Kathy screaming at him, and write one hundred pages in a day. There are at least fifty pulp fiction books credited to Ed Wood, with tantalizing titles like Orgy of the Dead, It Takes One to Know One, Death of a Transvestite, Night Time Lez, To Make a Homo, and Death of a Transvestite Hooker.

In December 1978, the Woods were evicted from their apartment by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. They were allowed to take only one suitcase apiece with them, and, thus, Wood lost his lifetime collection of film scripts, negatives, manuscripts, and film. The items were thrown into a dumpster behind the building. Desperate, and with few friends left, the couple moved in with Ed’s old friend, Peter Coe, at 5635 Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

On December 10, 1978, Wood went upstairs into Coe’s bedroom to get away from his nagging, drunken wife. He suffered a heart attack and called and pleaded for Kathy to come to him. She thought that Ed was just trying to get attention, and she ignored him. Only after he had stopped calling for her, did she go upstairs to see what he wanted. Ed Wood was dead at age fifty-four.

There is no doubt that Ed Wood was a talented man, but his vices got the best of him. Had he lived a few more years, he would have enjoyed the limelight again as his films grew in popularity with the hipster crowd and film buffs, who loved Wood’s artistic view, warts and all.