IN 1973, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, which Gorey had first encountered when he was five years old, cast its bat-winged shadow across his life again.
John Wulp, a director, producer, and playwright, was planning to launch his Nantucket Stage Company with a production, that summer, of the stage play based on Stoker’s novel. Dracula had premiered on Broadway in 1927 with the unknown Bela Lugosi as the count, his first major English-speaking role. Wulp’s version would open, somewhat less auspiciously, on the “minuscule stage at one end of a large assembly room” in Nantucket’s Cyrus Peirce Middle School.1 At a cocktail party, an “old drunk stumbled up” and buttonholed Wulp, telling him he really ought to get Edward Gorey to design the production. Wulp knew Gorey, though not well; Frank O’Hara had introduced the two men at the New York City Ballet. Still, he hazarded a call. “Sure, why not?” was Gorey’s game reply.
Gorey met with the director, Dennis Rosa, and they sketched out what Wulp calls “a grand plan” for the set design, after which Ted “just went home and did his drawings and sent them to me.” Brilliantly, he conceived the drop curtain, proscenium, and backdrops as blown-up illustrations. By doing so, he put the scenery in knowing quotation marks, renouncing realism for an aestheticism that emphasized the play’s affinities with the gothic novel and Victorian melodrama. (He also made a virtue of inexperience: “I can no more design three-dimensional stage settings than I can fly,” he insisted.)2
Gorey’s stage design made theatergoers feel as if they’d stepped into one of his books. The proscenium was flanked on either side by sinister pansies springing from skull-shaped planters; their little “faces”—the characteristic blotches of dark color on a pansy’s petals—revealed themselves, on closer inspection, to be death’s heads. A winged skull, borrowed from Puritan graveyard iconography and reimagined with bat wings and vampire fangs, spanned the top of the arch. The drop curtain portrayed Lucy, the vampire’s victim, menaced by the count in the light of a skull-faced moon.
Dracula was a thumping success, according to Stephen Fife, who understudied the part of Renfield, the abject wretch enslaved by the vampire’s mesmeric powers. When the play opened, “the audience went nuts,” he recalled, “stamping their feet, screaming, exceeding what anyone had expected.”3 For playgoers and critics alike, the sets were the star of the show. “Everything is cross-hatched—the proscenium arch, dropped curtain, scenery (out of a window of a cross-hatched room, to a cross-hatched landscape),” marveled the New York Times drama critic Mel Gussow, a Gorey devotee who would prove, over the course of his long life at the paper, to be a tireless advocate for the Gorey cause. “Stylized like a thirties movie, everything is in black and white (even the emotions), except for occasional, ominous drops of red.”4
Emboldened by the rave reviews, Wulp set his sights on Broadway, only to discover that a producer named Harry Rigby, another “great Edward Gorey fan,” had snapped up the professional rights. (Wulp had only secured the summer-stock rights.) Rigby was trying to wheedle Ricardo Montalban into the title role. It would take Wulp three years’ worth of maneuvering to get the Broadway rights. In the meantime, he pressed Gorey to swear an oath of loyalty to his vision of the play, telling him, “Edward, you know this was really all my idea; you must give me a letter saying that you will not design the show for anybody else.” Gorey signed on the line.
* * *
Gorey amused himself, in ’74, by writing movie reviews for the SoHo Weekly News under the anagrammatic pseudonym Wardore Edgy. Founded in 1973, the News was an alternative newsweekly, like the Village Voice. Gorey’s weekly column, ingeniously titled Movies, consisted almost entirely of deliciously bitchy eviscerations, written in a dishy, just-between-you-and-me voice that crossed Ronald Firbank with John Waters. His description of Gene Hackman as “exerting all the fascination of a water stain”5 will live in infamy; so, too, his observation that Regina Baff in Road Movie resembled “a disemboweled mattress”6 and that Elizabeth Wilson’s “facial contortions” in Man on a Swing “would be excessive on Daffy Duck.”7
Informed by an autodidact’s quirky knowledge of the medium and its history, Gorey’s verdicts are guided by the unwavering compass needle of his idiosyncratic tastes. Passing judgment on Robert Altman’s movies, he was happy to admit he didn’t have “the faintest clue to what they are meant to be in aid of.”8 (The phrase is a patented Goreyism. Alexander Theroux remembers Gorey’s mental torment during Bobby Deerfield, a 1977 tearjerker about a race-car driver in love with a terminally ill woman. “Gorey literally moaned through the entire movie,” Theroux recalls, “squawking, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ and snapping several times out loud, ‘Can someone please tell me what this is in aid of?’”)
Yet the more he detests a film, the more fun he has with it. Gorey’s reviews, like Gore Vidal’s talk-show banter, are vehicles for bon mots, the wickeder the better. He finds The Great Gatsby (1974), with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, “boring, boring, boring” to watch but great fun to hate: “Bruce Dern’s splendidly bushy mustache, which so effortlessly stole The Laughing Policeman from Walter Matthau’s lower lip, has here been reduced to a Twenties’ lower-half-of-the-upper-lip affair, and its semi-loss seems to have reduced him to a glassy eyed querulousness.”9 Sam Waterston looks like “the offspring of Roddy [McDowall] and Tony Perkins.” Al Pacino is “the name of a local hole in space.”10
The paper soldiered on ’til ’82, but Gorey stopped writing for it in late ’74 or early ’75; why he called it quits, Michael Goldstein, the News’s publisher, can’t recall. At their best, Gorey’s reviews combine a playful cattiness with an appreciation of the fan mentality as against the mind-set of the professional critic. Gorey was unabashedly an amateur in the Barthesian sense of the word, meaning a critic who hasn’t forgotten how to love the thing he’s writing about (cinema), even if he hates the example at hand (The Great Gatsby).
The important thing was to have a heated opinion, the more self-parodically melodramatic the better. Gorey’s most poisonously witty quips are so over the top we know they’re at least part put-on, which is the lion’s share of the fun, as is his unrestrained glee in hating what our social betters—the critics—tell us we’re supposed to like and liking what we’re told is beneath contempt. I defy you to read his verdict on the state of the Hollywood movie in the ’70s and not guffaw: “Young man overheard saying to his girlfriend around NYU: ‘Make a movie of it, Roseanne, and shove it up your ass.’ It is this sensibility, I feel, that accounts for so much of the filmmaking today.”11
* * *
Gorey may have dropped his SoHo Weekly News column simply because he was stretched thin. On top of his freelance work, there were exhibitions, such as his show Plain and Coloured Drawings, at the Graham Gallery in Manhattan, and Phantasmagorey: The Work of Edward Gorey, at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. Organized by his friend Clifford Ross, Phantasmagorey was Gorey’s first major retrospective; it traveled around the country for three years. (The artist did his best to pooh-pooh the conclusion that he had “arrived,” saying, “Usually my work is exhibited as part of a cookie festival with tennis.”)12
Then, too, he may have been distracted by his personal affairs, most consumingly his last, great crush.a In July of 1974, Gorey began sending lavishly illuminated envelopes to Tom Fitzharris, a darkly handsome young man who was twenty-one years his junior. (Gorey was forty-nine; Fitzharris, twenty-eight. Where and when they met we don’t know.) According to Glen Emil, the Gorey collector and scholar, each letter “contained a single card, with a hand-lettered literary quotation drawn upon one side, of significance known only to the sender and its recipient.”13 Susan Sheehan, writing in the New Yorker about an exhibition of the envelopes, notes that the “ideas seemed to play off conversations between the two friends, things mentioned in passing.”14
As he did in his correspondence with Peter Neumeyer, Gorey used his letters to share gleanings from his encyclopedic reading—quotations from his commonplace book that resonated with his philosophical outlook or struck sparks in his imagination: “Inspiration is the moment when one knows what is happening. In general, we do not know what is happening”—Magritte. “Everything we come across is to the point”—John Cage. “Our own journey is entirely imaginative. Therein lies its strength”—Céline. And on a lighter note: “Life is too short not to travel first class”—Wyndham Lewis.
Gorey created these works of art, intended for an audience of one, at the very moment when mail art was going full tilt. Loosely associated with the neo-Dada movement called Fluxus, mail art used the letter and its envelope as artistic mediums and the postal service as a democratic alternative to the elitist art world. Mail artists sent their friends cryptic, high-concept, or goofy messages in envelopes decorated with collages, found objects, or images created with rubber stamps; the letter became art as soon as it was mailed. It was very much a New York phenomenon; Ray Johnson, who founded the network of mail artists known as the New York Correspondance [sic] School, was perhaps its best-known practitioner.
While Gorey was undoubtedly driven to decorate his envelopes out of a compulsive aestheticism, not to mention horror vacui, it’s unlikely that he was unaware of the mail art phenomenon, given his insatiable appetite for culture. Whether or not Gorey thought of the Fitzharris letters as mail art, he seemed to view them as an aesthetic expression of some sort. Fitzharris soon “noticed that the envelopes were numbered—a series,” writes Sheehan. “He was not surprised to see the calculation behind the whimsy; Gorey’s genius was as organized as it was prolific.”15
But regardless of whether he thought of them as avant-garde art, Gorey’s illustrated envelopes for the Fitzharris letters are spectacular—among the “finest examples of [his] artistry, rivaling any of his book illustrations,” in Emil’s judgment. “Their sheer entertainment—the character development and lightness of delivery—[is] very appealing.…Gorey’s draftsmanship seems especially precise and crisp, unlabored and free.”16
Gorey’s letters—fifty of them, all told—kept coming at the rate of one a week for a little less than a year.17 A good number of the envelopes feature the pair of bandit-masked dogs who star in L’Heure Bleue (1975). As in the book, each member of the couple wears a letterman’s sweater adorned with the letter T, one for Tom, one for Ted. Clearly a close friendship was taking root, at least in Gorey’s mind. Peter Wolff remembers a quiet, clean-cut, “nice-looking Middle American–type younger guy” materializing out of nowhere in Gorey’s intermission crowd, sometime in ’74. Wolff recalls talk among the lobby clique of Ted’s latest crush.
Then, in the late summer of ’75, Gorey and Fitzharris went abroad. From August 28 through September 23, Gorey made a circuit of the starkly beautiful islands off Scotland’s west coast—the Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Fair Isle—with Fitzharris as a companion for part of the trip. At some point, Gorey made a pilgrimage to Loch Ness. (“I did not see the monster,” he later quipped, “to my great regret—the great disappointment of my life, probably.”)18
We don’t know whose idea the trip was, though given Gorey’s romantic attachment to the islands it was almost certainly his. It was inspired, he always claimed, by an irresistible desire to experience in person the landscapes he’d seen in the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. A romance set in the Hebrides, rich in local color, the film has attracted a cult following. The noir novelist Raymond Chandler fell under its spell, telling a friend, “I’ve never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialized as a show place. The shots of Corryvreckan alone are enough to make your hair stand on end (Corryvreckan, in case you don’t know, is a whirlpool which, in certain conditions of the tide, is formed between two of the islands of the Hebrides).”19
“I saw the movie,” said Gorey, “and fell in love with the scenery and knew I wanted to go there.” It was the only time that he ventured outside the United States (other than a brief trip with his Garvey grandparents, at the age of seven, to Cuba and Key West). Unbelievably, Gorey, whose imaginative life was steeped in England and Englishness, flew into Prestwick airport, in Glasgow, and out of Heathrow airport, in London, without setting foot in England, beyond Heathrow and maybe the odd railway platform.20 Alison Lurie thinks he knew on some level that the England of his imagination—the Anglophile’s England, not to be found on any map—wouldn’t survive a collision with the real thing. “England before, let us say, 1930 or ’40—that was the period that he liked,” she says, “and he didn’t want to see the England of supermarkets and shopping carts—the Americanized, commercialized England that developed after World War II.”
Gorey’s explanation, in an interview years after the fact, was, “I’m not interested in places from a cultural point of view, thank you. I went for the scenery more than anything else.”21 It could have sprung from his pen: gloomily beautiful peatlands, ancient tors jutting out of the landscape, standing stones like the megaliths at Callanish in the Hebrides, sheer cliffs plunging into boiling foam.
Something in the severe beauty of these remote hunks of rock spoke to him, but what did it say? Did it bring on the Celtic twilight, as he liked to call the romantic melancholy that was his Irish birthright? Gorey turned fifty that year; maybe the movie’s heartbreaking love story, set against the desolate beauty of the landscape, stirred something in him at a moment when he was wondering, possibly, if he was going to spend the rest of his life alone. “I know where I’m going / And I know who’s going with me,” goes the movie’s theme song, a haunting, centuries-old Scottish-Irish ballad. “I know who I love / And the devil knows who I’ll marry.”
Sometime during the trip, Fitzharris and Gorey parted company. “When I asked him about the trip, he said [that] after two weeks or something Tom had gone off with a nurse,” Skee Morton recalls. “And so Ted went on alone.” (A female nurse, it should probably be added; there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of Wolff and the others who met him that Fitzharris was straight.) Gorey headed off for “the most remote islands he could get to,” as Skee remembers it. “I know he was much taken by the west of Scotland; I think he liked it being so remote and desolate. He even talked, but not very seriously, about moving there, but he wouldn’t have been able to take the cats because of the quarantine they had then.”22 It was Gorey’s last trip abroad.
Back in New York, he reassumed his place among the chatty Balanchinians in the State Theater; Fitzharris, like all painful memories, was consigned to Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, never to be mentioned again. “Ted never said anything about anything,” Wolff recalls. “But there was a sense that [he] was sad about something.” In retrospect, some of the quotations from his letters to Fitzharris take on a bittersweet, sometimes even Beckettian subtext: “I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear one another apart and perhaps in that way really learn something from one another”—Francis Bacon. And: “I often think I am possessed with things I really want, but when I come to search find it only a shadow”—diary of a Dutch sailor put ashore on the island of Ascension.
* * *
L’Heure Bleue assumes a melancholy air, too, if we read it as a bittersweet memento of what was almost certainly the last of Gorey’s unrequited crushes. Published under his Fantod Press imprint the year he and Fitzharris took their trip, it’s a gorgeous book, the only Fantod printed in two colors, black and a lush cerulean blue. The title derives from the French term for that fleeting period in early dawn or late dusk when the indirect light of the sun paints the sky a shimmering blue. It’s a time of day rich in poetic associations: ambiguity, ambivalence, wistfulness, time slipping away. (In English, it’s the “magic hour.”)
Was Gorey in a blue mood, reflecting on love, loneliness, and passing time? L’Heure Bleue is cryptic—an extension, perhaps, of his correspondence with Fitzharris. We feel as if we’re overhearing a conversation between intimates, full of in-jokes, oblique references, coded allusions. In each panel, the dogs exchange enigmatic snatches of dialogue, surrealist non sequiturs that recall the hermetic languages couples and close friends slip into. Here they are, strolling alongside topiary versions of themselves. “It seems to me wine warms up very quickly.” “I never know what you think is important.” In another panel, they’re standing in front of a wrought-iron fence on which the ivy is making arabesques. “I never insult you in front of others.” “I keep forgetting that everything you say is connected.”
“I never know what you think is important.” L’Heure Bleue. (Fantod Press, 1975)
L’Heure Bleue is somber nonsense. The inadequacy of language and the impossibility of communication is a theme, as it was in Gorey’s correspondence with Fitzharris. In one of his letters, he quoted George Gissing’s 1889 novel, The Nether World: “Is there such a thing in this world as speech that has but one simple interpretation, one for him who utters it and one for him who hears?”
The book opens with the two dogs, in the Ted and Tom sweaters they wear throughout the book, contemplating a half finished phrase hanging in the air against the silhouette of darkened trees under a luminous blue sky—a subtly surrealist conjunction of night and day that calls to mind Magritte’s Empire of Light paintings. “Ove one anoth,” the ornate antique typography spells out. It wants to be “Love one another,” but the letters the dogs hold—R and O in one dog’s paw, ZDEM in the other’s—ensure that phrase will never be completed. “Move one another” is the best they can hope for, though whether that means moving in the romantic sense of affecting someone emotionally or in the adversarial sense of budging another solitary from his set ways in a contest of wills is a mystery.
In the last panel, we see them sitting on top of a Ford Model T–type car, riding away from us into the blue. A tiny inscription beneath the back window tells us, in French, that the drawing is based on a photograph by “T.J.F. III”—Thomas J. Fitzharris III by any other name. Knowing what we know, the book’s ending feels like a nocturne for Gorey’s hapless attempts at relationships over the years. In 1992, he told Stephen Schiff of the New Yorker that he’d more or less given up on love. “I mean, for a while I’d think, after some perfectly pointless involvement that was far more trouble than it was worth—I’d think, ‘Oh God, I hope I don’t get infatuated with anybody ever again.’ And it’s been sixteen, seventeen years, so I think I’m safe.”23 Seventeen years was exactly the span between that interview and his ill-fated trip with Fitzharris.
In 1975, Putnam capitalized on the success of Amphigorey by publishing Amphigorey Too, which collected twenty of Gorey’s little books. It was dedicated, “For Tom Fitzharris.”
* * *
By ’76, Gorey’s career, if not his love life, was on a roll.
Wulp had at last gotten the professional rights to Dracula, raised the money to mount a production, and rounded up some coproducers. Dennis Rosa, who’d directed the Nantucket show, was back in the director’s seat. Frank Langella, then a svelte, dark-haired lady-killer, would play the title role. Gorey would redesign his sets for Broadway.
On October 20, 1977, “the Edward Gorey production of Dracula,” as everyone insisted on referring to it, opened at the Martin Beck Theatre to almost universal acclaim.b Receiving the marquee treatment in the PR campaign gave Gorey the fantods: “It makes me feel quite faint and utterly far away,” he moaned.24 Still, it was inevitable: Langella got top billing in the program, but Gorey’s stunning sets stole the show.
Always ill at ease in the spotlight, Gorey tried to brush off the accolades by belittling his sets as amateur efforts, pointing out, “It’s the first time I’ve ever designed a Broadway show.”25 True enough, although he had, in a sense, been apprenticing as a stage designer. He’d designed the Nantucket production, of course, and in 1975 he’d done the costumes and backdrop for act 2 of Swan Lake for a production by the Long Island–based Eglevsky Ballet.
Reviewing that performance for the New York Times, Don McDonagh dismissed the ballerina and dancer who danced the pas de deux as “not one of the most memorable pairings” but was lavish in his praise of Gorey’s talents. “What was of uncommon interest was the scenery, which had a haunted feeling of mischief as much as menace,” wrote McDonagh. “The lake had a darkened castle on a small island and a large brooding cloud that suggested a bird of prey with the hint of a swan trapped between its wing and head. It was fiendishly effective, and one wonders why no one has tapped Mr. Gorey’s considerable talent for ballet design before now for our major companies.”26 Finally, he’d done the backdrop for a production of Giselle mounted in early ’77 by Peter Anastos’s troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. In her New Yorker review, Arlene Croce praised the Gorey decor, a “sorrowful vista dominated by weeping willows and dotted with funeral urns.”27
Gorey’s first order of business, in reimagining the Dracula sets for the Martin Beck Theatre, was scaling up to Broadway proportions the versions designed for the shoe-box stage of the Cyrus Peirce Middle School. The arched, cryptlike vault that framed all three acts had to be blown up from twelve to thirty-five feet in height, as did the scenery nestled within it, which changed with each act. (In addition to the masterstroke of adding a jot of red to each black-and-white scene, another flash of ingenuity on Gorey and Rosa’s part was the use of the vault’s arches as frames into which the backdrops for each act—plugs, as the canvas-covered inserts are called in the trade—could be slotted.)28
Gorey redrew the sets on a quarter-inch-to-a-foot scale (as opposed to the standard half-inch-to-a-foot ratio) to avoid “acres of cross-hatching,” then handed his sketches off to Lynn Pecktal, the scenic supervisor, who oversaw the building and painting of the sets.29 Pecktal marveled at the fine-grained detail of “the books [in Dr. Seward’s library], the wallpaper in the bedroom, the coffin scene, full architectural sketches, stonework, statues, all of that.” Gorey’s scenery, which cost one-eighth of the show’s budget, was “more lavish and detailed than is usual on Broadway,” Mel Gussow noted in his New York Times Magazine profile of Gorey.30
Writ large, Gorey’s obsessively crosshatched drawings, with skulls and bats hidden everywhere, were breathtaking. In act 1, set in the library in Dr. Seward’s sanatorium, every leather-bound volume was lovingly rendered, as were the bats and skeletons flanking the good doctor’s fireplace. In Lucy’s boudoir, the setting for act 2, the drapes of her four-poster were held aloft by bat-winged putti; black-and-white pansies with death’s-head faces writhed, serpentlike, out of vases embellished with skeletons. And in the third act, set in the burial vault where Dracula sleeps in his coffin, mummified corpses reposed in niches and Gorey’s bat-winged, vampire-fanged skulls adorned the pillars. The costumes, too, delivered witty asides: Dracula’s watch chain was strung with teeth (canines, naturally), and the lunatic Renfield wore striped asylum pajamas with bat-shaped buttons and Goreyesque sneakers with bat silhouettes on their toes.
In Gorey’s work, “decor becomes description,” as Gussow insightfully pointed out. “Between bindings, he is his own stage and costume designer as well as author and director.…Theatrical design was a natural next step.”31 Of course, being Gorey, he would do the unexpected thing, and in his Dracula scenery, he did just that, creating sets that dance on the line—there’s that betwixt-and-between theme again—between bringing the book’s illustrations to life and transposing the play into the black-and-white flatland of the printed page. As always in Gorey’s aestheticized worldview, life imitates art more than art imitates life.
Reviewers, with very few exceptions, swooned over Gorey’s sets. Newsweek judged them “magnificently macabre” and “spiked with irony,” “all in blacks and whites and grays, as if the blood had been drained from them.”32 “Dazzled and dominated” by Gorey’s set, Time’s reviewer concluded that, while the cast acquitted itself well, “the show belongs first, last, and almost always to Gorey and Langella,” presumably in that order.33
One of those very few exceptions, to no one’s surprise, was the invincibly nasty John Simon, a theater critic who specialized in malice toward all but especially toward women, whose physical quirks he caricatured with waspish cruelty. And gays: he derided The Octette Bridge Club by P. J. Barry as “faggot nonsense” and was heard to observe, in a theater lobby, “Homosexuals in the theater! My God, I can’t wait until AIDS gets all of them.”34 The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who is gay, thinks “a lot of the things that he identifies with gay sensibility are certain kinds of irony, a sense of talking in quotation marks, and what we often call camp…”35 Thus when Simon sniffed, in his New York magazine review of Dracula, that “camp is there even before the actors commence: in Edward Gorey’s sets,” he’s insinuating there’s something queer about the ironic-gothic, comic-macabre vibe they give off.36 Deploring Gorey’s “misguided” decision to blow his drawings “up to mammoth size,” he writes, “Now, Gorey drawings are fine in their proper place and format; here they look like postage stamps carrying on as if they were Picasso’s Guernica—a sort of farcical megalomania that is the essence of camp.”37
Whatever camp is—and in Simon’s case it seems to be the gnawing fear that everyone gay is in on a joke that he doesn’t get—it isn’t “farcical megalomania.” Nevertheless, he raises a legitimate point: Is Gorey’s brilliantly understated wit of a piece with its miniaturist aesthetic? Does it lose its charm when translated to “mammoth size”?
One member of Dracula’s audience agreed with Simon wholeheartedly, and that theatergoer was Gorey. He went to see a preopening rehearsal at the Wilbur Theatre, in Boston—the play opened out of town, as shows often do, in hopes of working out the kinks before running the critical gauntlet in New York—and was horrified when he saw his drawings enlarged to monstrous proportions. “I practically had cardiac arrest, is what I practically had,” he told Dick Cavett. “I felt the scale was wrong, that I should have done them on a larger scale. I don’t like blown-up drawing very much.…I think some kind of monumentality crept into the set, which I wasn’t prepared for.”38
He was the odd man out. In 1978, Gorey was up for a Tony Award for best set design and best costume design. But Dracula nabbed two other Tonys, one for most innovative production of a revival and one for costume design. “That was one of the more preposterous things,” he kvetched in 1996. “I did all of eight costumes and they were zilch but everybody loved the sets. There was somebody else who deserved the set design award much more than I did that year, so they didn’t feel like they could give that one to me. They gave me the costume award instead.”39 Gorey couldn’t be bothered to attend the awards ceremony. (“I was off at the movies somewhere, probably,” was his only explanation.)40 He gave his Tony to a friend.c
He did manage, however, to cash the fat checks he received from the box-office proceeds. “He made a ton of money,” confirms Peter Wolff, his lawyer friend from the Balanchine scene, who reviewed Gorey’s contract for Dracula. Not that much lawyering was required: Wulp wanted to ensure that Gorey was well rewarded for his work on the play. It was his idea that Ted should receive 10 percent of the profits from Dracula. If that sounds extraordinary for a set designer, it is. Wulp explains the unusual arrangement with the shrugging admission, “I liked Edward. I really liked him. He was fun. And I loved the way Dracula looked…and I loved the fact that he disliked it so much.…I think I probably said to him, ‘Well, you might not like it, but it really made you well off.’”
That it did. The show ran for almost three years, closing on January 6, 1980, after 925 performances, during which time Gorey’s checks kept coming. Dracula earned “in excess of $2 million,” the New York Times reported.41 There were touring companies in the States, too, and in ’78 a short run in England, which, while not terribly successful from a producer’s-eye view, earned Gorey £42,000 for the rights to his set designs.
Andreas Brown, always quick off the mark maximizing the commercial potential of Gorey’s work, created a merchandising outfit to market “I saw Dracula” T-shirts, Dracula tote bags, and other tie-in merchandise. (The artist, with his usual wry pessimism, named it Doomed Enterprises.) “I got lawyers and agents and merchandisers—the whole schmear,” said Gorey.42 Brown mounted an exhibition in the Gotham gallery of his set designs and costume drawings, ringing up more than $17,000 in sales in the first week.
* * *
Gorey was anointed a demicelebrity by the mainstream media. There were profiles in mass-circulation glossies such as Us and People, which wondered, in its implacably middlebrow way, if Gorey would turn out to be the “Charles Schulz of the macabre,” a prospect that must’ve struck terror in his heart.43 In December of ’77, he made his only appearance on a nationally broadcast TV talk show, The Dick Cavett Show, wearing blue jeans and radiantly grimy Keds and, God knows why, a heavy sweater, which ensured that he glittered with sweat under the hot lights. Trying to put his foot-joggling, finger-twiddling subject at ease, Cavett adopted a glib, bantering manner, asking if he hadn’t been “lured into garages by strange people.” “No,” came the wary reply. “Any more than the average child? Any more than I was?” Cavett pressed. “I think less,” Gorey rejoined. “I don’t remember ever being lured anywhere by anybody.”44
Bill Cunningham, the New York Times photographer whose photos of New Yorkers flaunting their personal styles were a city institution until his death, in 2016, devoted his January 11, 1978, column to Gorey, juxtaposing one of Gorey’s self-portraits, from The Chinese Obelisks, with photos of him loping around the city in some of his twenty fur coats. “In the beginning, when he was relatively unknown, he contented himself with a vintage raccoon,” writes Cunningham. By the ’70s, he notes, “Mr. Gorey was no longer a relative unknown. He was no longer even a cult figure.…By the time the curtain went up on the year 1978, there was Mr. Gorey, a fur cry from his old pelt, swathed in Russian sable.”45
Ben Kahn Furs, a New York City furrier, got in on the act, commissioning Gorey to design a line of thirty-odd fur coats for men, which premiered in ’79. “I purposely did slightly more bizarre ideas,” said Gorey. “There was no use doing sketches of conventional coats, though I’d say there are plenty of fairly conventional things in the collection.”46 Representative of the fairly unconventional things in the Gorey line was a jacket inspired by a letterman’s sweater, made of nutria dyed red, and, of course, a Dracula-inspired cape, “a voluminous, black broadtail affair lined in red silk,” as the New York Times described it.47
Seventy-eight also saw Gorey stage-managing the design of a window display, late one night in early July, for Henri Bendel, the chic Fifth Avenue retailer of women’s fashion. He oversaw the strategic placement, on black-clad mannequins, of his homemade bats and frogs, hand-sewn and stuffed with rice. Another Goreyesque touch was what the Times described as “unborn creatures called Pheetus Pairdew”—another beanbag creation—nestled here and there.48 (The name is a Gorey in-joke, a phonetic rendering of “fetus perdu”—or lost fetus.) “The windows are unreal,” said a passerby the next morning. “The clothes are unreal. Would you wear anything so ghastly?”
Even more ghastly was something called A Gorey Halloween, an ABC children’s special that was broadcast, inexplicably, on October 30, 1978. Based—very loosely—on Gorey’s characters, it had something to do with four children in a haunted mansion and included a two-minute segment titled “The Gilded Bat,” which had nothing to do with The Gilded Bat, although it did feature Allegra Kent flapping about in a bat costume. The show starred “the most obnoxious assortment of child actors,” Faith Elliott recalls. “Among the pieces they desecrated was The Doubtful Guest. I remember some kid continuously shouting, ‘Benjamin! Where’s Benjamin?’”49
Seventy-eight was Gorey’s moment. Robert Cooke Goolrick had anticipated his breakthrough when he wrote, in the March 1976 issue of New Times magazine, “After 25 quiet years, Gorey is a hot act. Prices for first editions have shot up, prices for drawings have doubled.…The ubiquitous Peter Bogdanovich is interested in movie rights. Money is being raised for a film of Gorey’s one un-illustrated prose work, a silent film script called The Black Doll. Cultists fume while the Gotham and Putnam’s cash registers jingle. Andreas Brown chuckles and says, ‘There is about to be in this country a Gorey explosion.’ And at the center of it all stands Edward Gorey himself, who cocks his head with shy, quizzical amusement: ‘A Gorey explosion? How very apt. Little bits of me all over the place…’”50
By ’78, little bits of him were all over the place. There he was in Cunningham’s column, and in Henri Bendel’s windows, and in Ben Kahn’s latest line of furs for men, and in “Dracula Damask” wallpaper from Kirk-Brummel Associates, based on the bat-infested wallpaper seen in Lucy’s boudoir, and on ABC—to a minus effect—in A Gorey Halloween, and in Fête Diverse, ou Le Bal de Madame H—, the ballet whose scenario, costumes, and scenery he’d cooked up for the Eglevsky company. Then, too, there was his latest book, The Green Beads, and of course Dracula, which was still packing them in. “There is some talk about an Edward Gorey boutique in a major department store and a model room designed by Mr. Gorey,” the New York Times reported. “If it all works out, 1978 may be the year of the haunted house look.”51
But his crowning achievement, as far as he was concerned, was Gorey Stories, the musical revue based on his books that opened off-Broadway in December of ’77 and moved to Broadway in October of the following year.
* * *
A series of songs and sketches based on Gorey classics such as The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Doubtful Guest, Gorey Stories was conceived by Stephen Currens, an actor who got the brain wave of adapting Gorey’s little books for the stage. The composer David Aldrich provided Victorian-Edwardian musical settings. The show went over like gangbusters when they mounted a production, in ’74, at the University of Kentucky, where both Aldrich and Currens were students. Currens set his sights on New York. Slow dissolve to opening night, December 8, 1977, at the WPA Theatre, an off-Broadway house in Manhattan. The New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, ever the Gorey booster, proclaimed the show a “merrily sinister musical collage of Goreyana” whose libretto showcased “Gorey the gifted writer” of prose that’s “as intricate and as elegant as his spidery pictures.”52 The scenery, “a neat black and red checkerboard set,” was intended merely to invoke “the master’s haunting world,” not re-create it down to the last crosshatch; the spotlight was on Gorey’s writing.
Gorey was as charmed by Gorey Stories as he’d been underwhelmed by Dracula. “I saw it four times,” he said. “If someone had told me I would have to put anything of mine on stage, I would have said it wasn’t possible, but they did a fine job with the stories, and the music is very good.…What they didn’t attempt with Gorey Stories was to make it look like my work particularly.”53
John Wulp threw his hat in the ring as producer, along with Harry Rigby (the same Harry Rigby who’d dreamed of taking Dracula to Broadway), among others. Gorey would design new sets and costumes; Lynn Pecktal would reprise his Dracula role of scenic supervisor. Descriptions of Gorey’s scenery are hard to come by, but he told the Times that the sets would consist of “an abstract room and an abstract summer house, and while they will be in color, they will not exactly be the colors of the rainbow.”54
Gorey Stories (subtitled An Entertainment with Music) opened at the Booth Theatre on October 30, 1978, after fifteen preview performances. Then, in a twist of fate straight out of a Gorey story, it closed that same evening. Consensus holds that it was done in by an ill-timed strike by the city’s newspaper pressmen, as they were called. The presses that produced New York’s three major dailies had stopped rolling, obliterating any hope of reviews. As a result, the show sank like Little Zooks, the unloved infant in A Limerick who drowns in a lily-choked pond. Those reviews that did appear, published after the strike ended, on November 5, by which time Gorey Stories was history, suggest that the show wouldn’t have lasted long on Broadway even without a newspaper strike. Clive Barnes, writing in the New York Post, applauded Gorey Stories as “unique, odd, perverse, and engagingly entertaining” but thought it was “theatrical” without being “theater,” asserting that Gorey’s work simply didn’t lend itself to the stage—a charge that would be leveled at the nonsense “entertainments” he mounted on the Cape in his late, semiretired years.55
Such criticisms would dog subsequent attempts to adapt Gorey for the theater, such as Tinned Lettuce (1985), Amphigorey (1994), and The Gorey Details (2000). In Gorey’s work, word and image form an artistic gestalt; the combined effect is greater than that of text or illustration alone. Watching the cast of Gorey Stories chirping out a sprightly choral reading of The Gashlycrumb Tinies makes you realize, in an instant, just how indispensable his drawings are to the pleasures of his work.
Then, too, Gorey’s slighter offerings, such as the limerick about Little Zooks, don’t pretend to be anything but fribbles; their brief length and drawing-room scale are proportionate to their pleasures. They’re the literary equivalent of a bite of trifle; the very act of putting them onstage makes them feel overdone rather than understated, and understatement is the essence of Gorey’s droll wit. (“Edward is rather like chamber music,” says Clifford Ross. “You can’t turn him into a symphony.”)56
That understatement is the sum of his laconic narration, his characters’ flattened affect, and the oblique, sometimes hopelessly obscure nature of his absurdist (and absurdly erudite) humor. Which makes for more problems: actors like to act, and they like to make audiences react, whereas Gorey’s stories, even at their most amusing, are designed to elicit a small, wry smile—the face a cat makes when it’s licking feathers off its chops—rather than a belly laugh. Giving Gorey the musical-comedy treatment is a fraught proposition, like staging Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a figure-skating routine. (The opera director Peter Sellars puts his finger on the nub of the problem when he explains why Dracula didn’t feel very Gorey to him. Broadway is “all about ‘selling’ everything,” he says—“people coming right down to the middle stage and belting something. What I missed entirely in the Broadway shows was the mystery, the haunted quality, and the reserve and the secrecy, because Broadway is about showing it all.”)
Not that Gorey would have been fazed by any of these objections. “[Gorey Stories] was the only time I appreciated my own work, because it had nothing to do with me—somebody else did it,” he said. “The minute I heard things I’d written coming out of other people’s mouths, I absolutely adored it…”57
That, of course, is what makes a writer want to be a playwright. Gorey had succumbed to the romance of the footlights, and in his last decade or so he would spend most of his creative energies on plays, not books. Gorey Stories, meanwhile, “developed a kind of half-life on the amateur circuit,” as Gorey put it.58 Samuel French published the script, and the show has become, over time, a Halloween favorite.
* * *
Nineteen seventy-eight was memorable for Gorey in one other way: on October 11, Helen Dunham St. John Garvey Gorey died. She was eighty-six and had been living, for a year or so, in an assisted-living facility in Barnstable village, just down the road from the house on Millway where Gorey lived with his cousins when the City Ballet wasn’t performing. Built in 1880, the Harbor View Rest Home was a stately mansion, “quite grand,” as Skee Morton recalls it, “with big rooms, high ceilings, and marble fireplaces.”59 Gorey and his cousins referred to it, with predictable black humor, as “Hemlock Manor.”
As Skee remembers it, Ted had moved his mother to the Cape in the fall of ’76, when it had become obvious that she was too infirm to continue living alone in her Chicago apartment. He was dutiful in his visits to Hemlock Manor, and Skee dropped in now and then, but Ted’s aunt Isabel, Helen’s sister, rarely stopped by, despite living only a few minutes’ drive away. A lifetime of sibling rivalry between the two strong-willed women had taken its toll.
Like his aunt, Gorey had a charged relationship with his mother. “Distance enhanced their relationship” is Eleanor Garvey’s dry way of putting it. Says Skee, “They would talk on the phone…and I think that worked better than when she was actually there telling him what to do—‘Put on your boots,’ and things.” The devoted mother of a gifted only child, she could be nudgy and suffocatingly oversolicitous. Her letters to Ted at Harvard are full of don’t-forget-to-wear-your-rubbers reminders and promises of care packages: “I will get a batch of cookies off this weekend. Guess I told you I spent last one making fruitcakes, which are all bedded down waiting for the holidays.”d
Then again, caricaturing Helen Gorey as a smothering mother is too easy. For a good part of Gorey’s youth, she was a single parent supporting a child whose quirky brilliance and artistic mind she only half understood. On one of the rare occasions when Gorey spoke openly about his family, he said of his mother, “We were far closer than I really wished most of the time, and we fought a good deal right up until the time she died, at the age of 86. She was a very strong-minded lady.”60 In another conversation, he was even more pointed: “She had a stroke when she was about 80 and her entire character changed. All her hypocritical love for humanity vanished. Any parent-child relationship has its sides, you know. With Mother I was always getting carried away. I’d say, ‘Oh, Mother, let’s face it. You dislike me sometimes as much as I dislike you.’ ‘Oh, no, dear,’ she’d say. ‘I’ve always loved you.’”61 “But did she love your work?” the interviewer asks. Gorey chooses his words carefully: “She appreciated it. But, poor dear, she had become very sour toward me in the last five years of her life. She was, however, lovely to everyone else.”62
Skee confirmed that Helen “didn’t really understand [Ted’s] work all that well,” noting, “I don’t think she was terribly artistic.” True enough: Helen Gorey always seemed a bit baffled by her eccentric artist son. “I still don’t know where he gets his ideas,” she told an interviewer. “They seem to just sprout out of his head. He says, ‘I get an idea and I put it down and I don’t know if it means anything or not.’ I think it does, but I don’t know and he doesn’t know.” She laughed. “But then, Ted always did puzzle me.”63
Still, it’s significant that Gorey’s first anthology, a book he must’ve known would send up a bigger flare than anything he’d done to date, was dedicated, “For my mother.”
a As far as we know, that is.
b The Martin Beck, on West 45th Street, is now the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.
c The friend donated it, after Gorey’s death, to the Edward Gorey House. Located in Gorey’s former home in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, the Gorey House showcases exhibitions devoted to the artist and his work. It opened in 2002.
d Helen’s insistence on sending her son fruitcakes would explain Gorey’s imperishable aversion to the Christmas confection. He insisted there was only one fruitcake in existence, endlessly regifted around the world. One of his Christmas cards depicts a festive scene: a Victorian family, bundled up against the cold, disposing of unwanted fruitcakes—is there any other kind?—by heaving them into a hole in the ice. “My mother used to spend entire summers making fruitcake,” he said. “She wrapped them in brandied cloth. I always gave them away. I could never bear to say, ‘Mother, I hate fruitcake.’” (See Joseph P. Kahn, “It Was a Dark and Gorey Night,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1998, C4.) Of course, being Gorey, he was always happy to upend expectations at the drop of a hat. “Actually, someone gave me one a few years ago,” he admitted after his mother was gone. “I ate it. It wasn’t bad.”