IN 1979, WGBH, THE BOSTON affiliate of PBS, approached Gorey about creating animated title sequences for the soon-to-be-launched Mystery!, a Masterpiece Theatre spin-off devoted to British mysteries and crime dramas.
Herb Schmertz, the head of PR at Masterpiece’s corporate underwriter, Mobil Oil, had an ear cocked to the cultural buzz. Gorey’s Dracula fame preceded him, and Schmertz thought his work would be perfect for the new show’s opening titles and closing credits. It had just the right air of Agatha Christie whodunit and gothic spookiness. Joan Wilson, the show’s producer, needed little persuading. And she knew just the man to turn Gorey’s distinctive black-and-white imagery into animated sequences: Derek Lamb, a British animator known for his innovative work with the National Film Board of Canada.
All that remained was to beard Gorey in his den, or, rather, in Wilson’s office at WGBH. Lamb, a fervent fan of Gorey’s work, was “morbidly curious” to meet the man, he later confessed, having heard a rumor that Gorey had two left hands.1 (Seriously.) He broke the ice by screening his award-winning short Every Child, an avant-pop cartoon about a cherubic foundling whom no one wants. “I like it” was Gorey’s verdict. “It’s so sinister.” Then they got down to business. Gorey had prepared a detailed script for the title sequence, which Lamb remembered as “an intriguing concept using a Victorian children’s puppet theater.”
Unfortunately, its running time would have been somewhere around twenty minutes—a smidge overlong for an introduction that was supposed to last thirty seconds, tops. “They said it would last too long,” said Gorey. “I said, ‘Not if you make it go fast enough. If you just zip right around, it would probably take two minutes.’ But no, it would take hours. I thought, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’”2 There was “some serious pouting,” as Lamb remembered it, “and a lot of staring out the window.”3 Seven hours and several meals later, it was agreed that Lamb and his Montreal-based team of animators would pore over Gorey’s books and rough out a storyboard, based on selected stories, that would fit within the allotted time. With luck, it would meet with Gorey’s approval.
Janet Perlman, Lamb’s wife at the time and his partner in their animation company, Lamb-Perlman Productions, recalls him combing through the first two Amphigoreys, Xeroxing images that caught his eye, then cutting them out and arranging them on a table, moving this scene here and that one there to create a free-associated narrative flow. “They’re disconnected images,” yet “closely related enough that they don’t surprise you when one image goes to something completely different afterwards,” notes Eugene Fedorenko, one of the animators who worked on the Mystery! titles.
Gorey gave the storyboard his begrudging go-ahead and agreed to draw a few defining images, one for each of the scenes, that would serve as reference points for the animators. Lamb, Fedorenko, and Rose Newlove, another member of the team, traced Gorey’s “key frames,” as they’re known in the trade, then produced the drawings, twelve for each second of movement, that created the transitions between Gorey’s images, making the storyboard’s static tableaux come alive.
Fedorenko recalls the difficulties of animating Gorey’s bell-jar world. Rich in textures and dense with scene-setting details, a Gorey drawing isn’t “an image that you can hold up for two seconds and then switch to another one,” he points out. “They last and last and last.” Gorey’s dizzily intricate patterns had to be confined to the backgrounds; dressing a character in one of his richly detailed outfits would have sentenced the animators, at twelve drawings per second, to the cross-hatching treadmill. (These, remember, were the days of hand-drawn animation.) To further complicate matters, Gorey’s busiest patterns had to be avoided, since they produced a moiré effect on the low-resolution video of the day.
Perlman was struck by the virtuosity of Gorey’s draftsmanship. In an effort to capture his style as exactly as possible, she used a loupe to study his drawings and worked at his scale, using a crow-quill dip pen similar to the one he used. Noting his precise, accurate rendering of “the proportions of the urns, of the gravestones, of the finials,” she describes Gorey as a careful observer who never cut corners. “His patience is unbelievable. There was no easy thing about all of that cross-hatching; it was very fine work, and takes a long time to do.”
Her observations help explain why Hollywood hasn’t translated Gorey’s work into the animation medium. Even the experimental animators who pop up in animation festivals seem to have judged the challenge of putting Gorey on the screen too daunting. More’s the pity, since he once told an interviewer who asked him if he had any interest in animated versions of his books, “I would love to do full-length movies, but nobody’s ever asked me, so what the heck, you know.”4
When Mystery! debuted on February 5, 1980, viewers were entranced by the opening, a dreamlike procession of playfully sinister Gorey vignettes: a widow in Victorian mourning dress, celebrating her husband’s demise with a glass of wine, graveside; bowler-hatted sleuths shadowing a culprit, flashlights in hand; a swooning ingenue in an evening gown; a cocktail party of shifty-eyed suspects pretending not to notice the stiff sinking into the lake. The French-Canadian composer Normand Roger’s slinky minor-mode tango, inspired by the rhythm of the tiptoeing sleuths, is the glue that holds everything together. Roger’s wife at the time provided the ingenue’s melodramatic moan.
Gorey was predictably saturnine. “Derek Lamb was responsible for the whole thing,” he groused.5 Still, the Mystery! titles spread his name far beyond the Broadway theatergoers who’d seen Dracula. Generations succumbed to the dark drollery of the animated sequences,6 and advertising campaigns featuring Gorey graphics and tie-in merchandise such as the Mystery! sarcophagus box, a coffin-shaped pencil case with a Gorey skeleton embossed on its lid, spread the Gorey gospel while promoting the series. So, too, did the black-and-white Dracula-style sets, thick with Gorey cross-hatching, used in the early years of the series. When Vincent Price, and subsequently Diana Rigg, introduced each evening’s episode, they stood before a backdrop whose writhing wallpaper and hand-drawn decor were unmistakably Goreyesque. (Price called the set “Gorey Manor.”)
And then there were the “Fantods,” as WGBH cleverly dubbed them, rolled out in Mystery!’s third season—two- or three-minute dramatic readings of Gorey stories, accompanied by still images from his books, that filled out the hour at the end of a show. (British programs tended to run short by American standards.) Mystery! reached far into the hinterlands, where the morbid humor and arch sensibility of the Fantods sometimes furrowed the brows of Babbitts. From time to time, WGBH and Mobil received letters from viewers concerned about the Fraying of Our Moral Fabric, so alarmingly evidenced by Gorey’s stories. An outraged member of the viewing audience in Bellaire, Texas, deplored the Fantods as “satanic,” especially the one that made light of the “gruesome deaths” of little children (The Gashlycrumb Tinies); PBS should cease airing the “evil cartoons” posthaste!7 A viewer in Santa Barbara was no less appalled by the Tinies, decrying the segment as “the most sick presentation I have ever seen on television.” And then there was the dyspeptic Masterpiece fan in Andover, Massachusetts, who thought Gorey was a “ghoul” and that PBS was hell-bent on “spreading his spores.” The network owed the affronted millions out in Televisionland “some kind of explanation, somewhere,” for this “savagely tasteless” fare.
Gorey, predictably, was delighted by the Fantods. Of all the aspects of the show that bore his stamp, they alone met with his unreserved approval.
* * *
His affair with the theater continued to seduce him away from the writing desk. In 1980, he designed sets for an irreverent postmodern take on Don Giovanni that premiered in Manchester, New Hampshire, in September of that year as part of the festival known as Monadnock Music. The director was a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind named Peter Sellars. In decades to come, he would earn a reputation as opera’s enfant terrible, outraging the old guard with works like Nixon in China, set to a chugging minimalist score by John Adams.
All these years later, Sellars retains vivid impressions of his afternoon at the house on Millway, brainstorming set designs with Gorey. “While I proposed some rather wild things to do with the material, Ted’s answer was to create sets that were pure Palladio”—he laughs—“just sheer balance and clarity and absolutely nothing wild-eyed.” (Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance architect, championed a neoclassical aesthetic of clarity and symmetry. His ideas experienced a resurgence in the eighteenth century, giving rise to the style known as Palladianism.) Mostly white, with what Sellars calls “slightly etched, slightly fraught” line drawings of eighteenth-century architectural elements, Gorey’s flats were suspended against a pitch-dark background, their archways opening onto blackness. Sellars reads his juxtaposition of primal darkness and elegant restraint as a metaphor for the role of repression in Gorey’s work. “What we do as artists is affirm the presence of the secrets,” he says.
In ’81, Gorey designed the drop curtains for the Royal Ballet’s revival, at Covent Garden, of The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody), a comic ballet by Jerome Robbins. One depicts a cartoonish piano scuttling along on prehensile claw feet, its keyboard looking like a toothy maw; in another, the piano is dead, flat on its back, stiff-legged. Broken black umbrellas dance like bats in the gray sky, lashed by gusting winds. The New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg had done curtains for an earlier version of the ballet, but the New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay judged Gorey’s superior to Steinberg’s “in drawing, in fantasy, and in wit.”8
Robbins, it turns out, had met Gorey back in the City Center days and had been much amused by his eccentricities. He described the fantastic apparition in a letter to Tanaquil Le Clercq:
At first all you can see of him is his beard and mustache, then you start to see his eyes and teeth and some of his expressions; then you notice all the rings he wears and finally the fact that although he wears a rather elegant fur-lined coat his feet are shod in worn out sneakers. As an added fillip you perceive that the skin between his socks and the cuffs of his pants is very white and crowded with black and blue marks. Dear Abby what do you think?9
Gorey’s involvement with the theater continued in ’82, when he illustrated Harcourt’s new edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Written by T. S. Eliot to amuse his godchildren, it’s a lighthearted romp in verse through the secret world of felines. Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on Eliot’s book, had premiered in London’s West End the year before and would be coming to Broadway in ’82. “We expect sales to soar once the play is running,” Harcourt’s marketing director told the New York Times.10
Gorey’s following ensured that the hardcover edition sold out within two months of publication. In no time flat, Harcourt was doing a land-office business in the paperback edition, too. When the musical opened at the Winter Garden Theatre that October, sales of the book spiked off the charts. Once again, Gorey had lucked into an unexpected windfall; the book’s steady sales, propelled by what was then the longest-running musical in Broadway history, kept him in royalty checks for the rest of his life—one of several sources of steady income that afforded him a level of comfort and financial security in his white-bearded years. “Dracula of course was very remunerative because I had a piece of the show,” he revealed in a 1982 interview, but “what I make a lot of money now on is…T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The fact that Cats, the Broadway show, is based on it [means] it sells like hotcakes. I mean, my drawings have nothing to do with the show, but it’s in both paperback and hardbound and it’s selling like mad.”11
Old Possum is rambunctiously silly, drawing on Eliot’s fondness for Edward Lear (mostly in the cats’ names, such as Bombalurina and Jellylorum and Rumpelteazer). Of course Gorey was an incurable ailurophile and a Lear devotee, so the match was a perfect one. Working in his meticulous, fine-lined style, he portrays a tiger-striped feline on an ottoman, contemplating with deep satisfaction his secret cat name, which “no human research can discover”; a tabby conducting a chorus of mice; and the Jellicle cats cavorting under the moon, camouflaged in the dark by their tuxedo markings.12 (Gorey is scrupulous in his attention to the distinctive patterns of various cat breeds.)
Old Possum’s orange, black, and white cover is another of Gorey’s little masterpieces, depicting cats of various breeds striking dandyish poses in top hats and bowlers or brandishing Japanese fans decorated with feline motifs or, in a clever bit of mise en abyme, reading Old Possum, its cover a copy of the book’s actual cover. They’re posed against a many-tiered neoclassical monument, a layer cake of capitals and balusters whose details reflect Gorey’s close study of Dover books. Wittily, he duplicates the scene, as seen from behind, on the back cover.
Drawing on a lifetime of close observation, Gorey captures cats’ sleepy guile, their loopy antics, their majestic indolence, their solitary nature. Of all his characters, his cats are the only ones who look truly happy. Unlike his humans, who manage to look both deadpan and doleful, Gorey’s felines sport ear-to-ear grins. (Or maybe cats’ muzzles just look that way, and we’re anthropomorphizing, as we always do. It would be like Gorey to leave that question unresolved.) In melancholy moments, he seemed to regard humanity as another species altogether. Contrariwise, he seemed to see cats as kindred spirits, occasionally referring to them as “people.” He told an interviewer, “It’s very interesting sharing a house with a group of people who obviously see things, hear things, think things in a vastly different way.”13
* * *
With the same matter-of-fact contrarianism that made him insist that the “movies made a terrible mistake when they started to talk,” Gorey contended that “the musical theater has been downhill” since Gilbert and Sullivan. He never missed a chance, during the Dracula craze, to drop the hint that he much preferred G&S’s Victorian comic operas to bloodsucking. Now that Dracula was a success, he told New York magazine, “I wish someone would invite me to splash fresh paint on Gilbert and Sullivan.”14
Someone did, and as usual that someone was John Wulp. Wulp was teaching scenic design in the drama department at Carnegie Mellon—just the place for a Gorey version of The Mikado, it occurred to him. “I knew that Edward, a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, had long wanted to design this show, and I thought it would be ideal for a school production,” he recalls.15 The department chair, Mel Shapiro, was agreeable. So was Gorey—under one condition, as Wulp remembers it: “that the production be a traditional one with no gimmicks,” true to Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu was written at the height of Japonism—the infatuation, in Victorian England and belle époque France, with Japan—or, rather, the Japan of Western fantasies, a land of beguilingly exotic customs and culture, so far away it might as well have been Mars to an Englishman of the time. Yet Gilbert and Sullivan’s Japan is an Orientalized Britain: The Mikado is a pointed satire, in kimonos and topknots, of British politics and Victorian manners and mores. At the same time, Gilbert was sincerely interested in Japanese art and culture, and the Japanese aesthetic was undoubtedly part of what appealed to Gorey, along with the sparkling tunes and the libretto’s zippy wit.
After Dracula and Mystery!, Gorey was wary of being typecast as the guy who cranked out whimsically macabre black-and-white scenery by the yard. Now he had a chance to play against type, and he seized it, creating enchanting, pastel-colored backdrops that recall floating-world prints as well as the delicate washes of English watercolorists such as Edward Ardizzone. His drop curtain, “East Parade, Titipu” (reproduced in The World of Edward Gorey), depicts Japanese villagers promenading along a waterfront, flanked by a neat row of Tudor houses that look as if they’ve been airlifted from Stratford-upon-Avon; one of the strollers shelters under the sort of black parasol no British banker or barrister would be seen without rather than the Japanese bamboo model. His costumes are equally clever: the Mikado and Pish-Tush wear pajamalike Japanese trousers and split-toed socks, but their fanciful kimonos wed the traditional billowing sleeves to a Victorian gentleman’s suit jacket and cravat; their hats cross the British top hat with the lacquered headdresses worn by Japanese nobility of the period.
When the show opened at Carnegie Mellon’s Kresge Theatre, on April 14, 1983, Wulp was aghast. Shapiro had reconceived Gilbert and Sullivan’s Victorian comic opera as a country-and-western musical. “Mel either forgot [Gorey’s] request or chose to disregard it,” he remembers. “The show itself was bizarre: Edward’s beautiful, witty sets and costumes presented a view of Japan as it might have been imagined by an eccentric Victorian Englishman, while the actors behaved like fugitives from the Grand Ole Opry.”16 The reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shared Wulp’s discomfiture. Visually, the production was “quite stunning,” he thought, applauding Gorey’s sets and his “thoroughly delightful” costumes, “which incorporate a range of styles from Japanese kimonos to Edwardian knickers.”17 He was disconcerted, though, to hear the inhabitants of Titipu speaking in a cornpone twang and thought the hayride high jinks in one act dragged the show “into the realm of the lowest TV sitcom”—Gilbert and Sullivan meet The Beverly Hillbillies.
What Gorey made of this desecration is anyone’s guess. In a rare violation of his ban on travel, he’d gone to see the show, but what he thought of it not even Wulp knows. As in Gorey’s own stories, events took a bizarre turn after he saw the production: his real motivation in making the trip to Pittsburgh, it turned out, was his desire to see Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic, unsettling last work, the perverse—some might even say pornographic—installation Étant Donnés (1966), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “He wasn’t interested, really, in The Mikado,” says Wulp. “He was quite clear on his intent: he was going to go to Pittsburgh to see the show, then pop up to Philly to see the Duchamp. He was fascinated with it.”
Gorey never ceases to amaze. Who could’ve imagined that the man who claimed to “blush crimson at the other end of the phone” when someone asked him to illustrate something X-rated would make a pilgrimage (all the way to Philly, which for Gorey’s purposes might as well have been Saskatoon) to see a surrealist’s idea of a peep show?
Installed in the wall of a gallery full of Duchamp’s work, Étant Donnés appears, at first glance, to be a weathered rustic door set in an arch of bricks. Peer through the two peepholes in the door, though, and you’ll see what looks like the aftermath of a sex murder: on the grass in the foreground sprawls an uncannily realistic female mannequin, naked; in one hand, she holds aloft (rigor mortis?) an antique gas lamp. Her hairless sex looks like a wound. Nothing moves but a glittering waterfall pouring into a toy lake. The effect is both eerily realistic and obviously staged, somewhere between a crime-scene photo and a natural-history-museum diorama. Jasper Johns, the Pop artist, called it “the strangest work of art in any museum.”18
Gorey was a man full of locked rooms whose art is about what isn’t said and isn’t shown. Was he intrigued, as a stage designer and aspiring playwright, by Duchamp’s stagecraft? Was he taken by the intimacy and secrecy of a theater designed for an audience of one? (Étant Donnés can only be viewed by a single person at a time.) Was he drawn by Duchamp’s combination of voyeurism and concealment? Did he respond to the presentation, in Duchamp’s piece, of sexuality as mysterious, dark, closeted? Maybe he saw the intensely personal work (which Duchamp had worked on in secret and which was revealed to the world only after he died) as a surrealist shrine to desire—something he claimed not to feel but that seemed to haunt him nonetheless.
* * *
“My nightmare is picking up the newspaper some day and finding out George has dropped dead,” Gorey had said in 1974.
On April 30, 1983, his worst fears were realized: George Balanchine died. He was seventy-nine. For Gorey, it was the end of a sustained crescendo of genius that had lasted nearly three decades, diminishing only at the very end, when Mr. B., as his dancers knew him, was reduced to a shadow of his brilliance by heart problems, failing eyesight, and—catastrophically for a choreographer—a deteriorating sense of balance brought on by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The City Ballet was scheduled to perform that day, a Sunday, and the show went on, as it must. Lincoln Kirstein, the City Ballet’s cofounder, stepped in front of the curtain just before the matinee performance began. Addressing the hushed crowd, he said, “I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B. is with Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky.”19 The man Gorey called “the great, important figure in my life…sort of like God” was gone.
For almost thirty years, Balanchine’s art had been Gorey’s aesthetic lodestar. Mr. B.’s dances meant everything to him, though their significance can’t be measured by any direct influence on his work. “There wasn’t very much I could take directly from George,” he told Clifford Ross.20 Of course, thirty years spent watching Balanchine’s dances had to have some effect. Most obviously, Gorey’s characters often strike balletic poses and tend to stand with their feet turned out, in ballet positions. (As did Gorey himself, according to Alexander Theroux: “He invariably stood in the naturalistic stance known as contrapposto, hand on hip, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy or Donatello’s David, but at times he would appear almost in balletic ‘turn out’ or fully cross-legged—a gay icon—in exaggerated pose.”)21 “It’s not so much conscious, but I think I realized early on one of the things that makes ballet what it is, is that it’s the maximum of expressiveness,” said Gorey. “You know, obviously, when your legs are turned out, they’re, well, like Egyptian art or something. You know, each piece is the way it’s most expressive: the profile, the profiles of the legs, the front of the torso, the front of the hands, and stuff.”22
Then, too, Gorey people, though hardly ever in motion, often seem as if they’ve just moved or are about to move. “In Edward Gorey’s drawings, everybody is at a tipping point where they’re off-balance, so you know they’re not in a static pose,” Eugene Fedorenko points out. To be sure, his carefully staged tableaux seem about as dynamic as daguerreotypes next to the action-packed drawings of illustrators like Ralph Steadman and cartoonists like Jack Kirby, whose characters explode out of the picture plane. Yet through balletic attitudes—a tilt of the head, a hand gesture, the slightly off-center inclination of the torso—Gorey offers the subtlest suggestion of movement.
More profoundly, his clarity and concision—the witty brevity of his writing, the economy of his line, his eloquent use of negative space, his beautifully balanced compositions—harmonize with the Balanchinian aesthetic. Mr. B’s choreography is “pared down to something that is irreducible and Ted had that,” says Peter Sellars. “Everything unnecessary is eliminated and the strange empty space that results is psychologically charged.”
Gorey found wisdom in Balanchine’s artistic philosophy—“Everything he ever said about art I just thought was so true”—and inspiration in his approach to his craft.23 “George Balanchine’s choreography has had—it’s totally impossible to put into words—but somehow the way he works has influenced me a great deal,” said Gorey. “The way he works with dancers; in a sense I’m trying to emulate his thinking.”24 On occasion, he went into greater detail about what he meant by that. “Well, I think one thing he taught me, above all, is, ‘Don’t waffle,’” he said. “‘Better don’t do’ was one of his phrases. Or, on the other hand, ‘Just do it!’ You know, don’t dither.”25 “How does a writer-illustrator apply that?” the interviewer wondered. “Well, I try not to presuppose what I’m doing,” Gorey replied. “I just do it.”