Director: “You cannot drink on the set.”
Lon Chaney, Jr: “Then I cannot work on the set.”
Actor and son of silent film legend Lon Chaney, Sr. (The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera). Lon Chaney, Jr.’s father discouraged him from show business and pushed him to attend business school. It wasn’t until the great man passed away in 1930 that his son started acting. Chaney, Jr.’s career would go on to span five decades and mostly consist of horror movies and Westerns. Although he first gained notice for his portrayal of Lennie in Of Mice and Men (1939), his breakout role was as the titular star of his best-known film, Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941). Chaney, Jr., is the only actor to play all of the studio’s trademark monsters: the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Dracula. (Technically he only played the son of Dracula, but close enough.) Despite some commendable work as a supporting actor in a few A-list films—High Noon (1952), The Defiant Ones (1958)—he never rose above typecasting or cult status. Somewhat fittingly, Chaney’s final picture was Frankenstein vs. Dracula (1971). He was cast not as a monster, but rather Frankenstein’s mute henchman—a silent role of which his father would likely still have disapproved.
HE THOUGHT HE’D TAKE it easy this time. This was Lon Chaney’s third go-round as Frankenstein’s Monster. The last time, a year earlier, he’d done a goofy spin on the character for NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Now he was playing a more traditional version for the ABC sci-fi anthology series Tales of Tomorrow. By “traditional version,” it meant he was supposed to break things: smash windows, bust chairs, shatter mirrors—monster stuff. But Chaney worried he’d been a little too overzealous during previous rehearsals, tearing apart the set when cameras weren’t actually rolling, and driving the prop masters crazy. So he figured, this run-through, he’d hold back—take it easy—just go through the motions.
Directors who worked with Chaney applied an informal rule: No changes could be made after lunch. Chaney drank steadily throughout the day, the costumed six-nine, 284-pound brute sipping from a flask between takes, so that by afternoon he sometimes had no idea what he was doing. Word around town was: Get what you could from him in the morning.
The first time he played Frankenstein’s Monster, in Ghost of Frankenstein, the tipsy terror had gotten lost in the labyrinthine set, and even with the entire crew shouting instructions from nearby, it was ten minutes before he staggered out. In The Mummy’s Tomb, he’d banged his costar Elyse Knox’s head against a stone column while carrying her through a cemetery gate. In The Mummy’s Ghost, he’d nearly choked seventy-year-old actor Frank Reicher to death during a strangulation scene (Reicher in fact passed out), then punched his hand through a window he’d specifically been told did not yet have breakaway glass.
Chaney drank steadily throughout the day, the giant six-nine, 284 pound brute sipping from a flask between takes, so that by afternoon, he sometimes had no idea what he was doing.
At least now, on Tales of Tomorrow, he had realized he only needed to use brute strength when the cameras were rolling. So for the next run-through, in the scene in the dining room of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle where the monster knocks the maid and butler to the ground, then rips apart the furniture, Chaney went ahead and knocked the two down, but when it came time to throw a chair, he hesitated, then gently set it back down. Two scenes later, same thing: chair was lifted, chair was gently set back down. For good measure, Chaney threw in a pantomime of what he planned to do with the chair when it really counted, pretending to hurtle it to the ground with the full force of his massive frame. Sure, it looked ridiculous, but he’d nail it live. Problem was, this “run-through” was live—the actual broadcast going out live on network television. And Chaney had no idea.