Bela Lugosi spoke before a Los Angeles crowd of over two thousand people in August of 1944. The Hungarian-American Council for Democracy (HACD) sponsored the mass rally to urge the Roosevelt administration to end immigration restrictions for Hungarian Jews and to pressure the collaborationist Nazi regime that controlled Lugosi’s homeland to protect those that remained. He had no way of knowing the effort did little good. The SS, with the direct aid of Hungarian fascists, had already deported nearly half a million Jews to death camps in Austria and Poland the previous month.
Lugosi described the plight of Hungary’s Jews nearly a quarter of a century after he fled his native land to escape the White Terror that ensued after a right-wing government seized Budapest. His previous support for the communist regime of Belá Kun, who had briefly come to power in 1919 only to be quickly toppled after a disastrous war with Romania, placed Lugosi on the kill list of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who, for all intents and purposes, ruled from Budapest as head of a military junta. The elderly warlord still controlled Hungary in 1944, though his regime existed largely at Hitler’s sufferance. Hungarian forces aided the invasion of the Soviet Union, and members of the country’s large, fascist Arrow Cross Party actively participated in the Holocaust throughout eastern Europe.
Born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in eastern Hungary, Lugosi became his stage name, an homage to his 1882 birthplace, Lugos (today Lugoj, Romania). He abandoned school at an early age but quickly rose to prominence in Hungary’s National Theatre. Although granted a deferment when the Great War came in 1914, he volunteered to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1915, he received his first war wound fighting against the forces of the Russian czar in what is now western Ukraine. A few months later, he would receive a second wound. Ironically, this time he had been fighting in the Carpathians, the treacherous, jagged mountain range that in the twentieth century became fully associated with vampire legends and Count Dracula himself.
Lugosi left the army in 1916 having suffered a “mental collapse.” The precise cause of the incident remains unclear. We do know that Lugosi, in one of the rare moments he spoke about the Great War, described the experience of being buried alive in a trench beneath a mound of his comrade’s corpses as Russian forces clambered over him. After leaving the army, he returned to the theater and worked to create an actor’s union. Lugosi supported the goals of the communist regime and became especially vocal in his calls for the nationalization of the theater.
He was well known enough to Horthy’s regime to flee to Vienna after Kun’s fall. Agents of the new government continued to pursue him. Lugosi worked his way to America in 1920, first aboard a merchant ship bound for New Orleans and then on to Ellis Island. During the Red Scare of the 1920s, with most eastern Europeans suspected of being communist revolutionaries (and Lugosi had, after all, been an actual communist revolutionary), becoming a naturalized citizen proved almost impossible. Lugosi did not become a citizen until 1931, the year that Dracula made him an international star.
Lugosi’s involvement in the labor movement did not end after Dracula. He became, along with Boris Karloff, a lifelong supporter of the Screen Actors Guild. Lugosi served for several years on the advisory board. He also attempted to unionize his costars, as did Karloff, who handed out SAG applications in his heavy-browed Frankenstein makeup during the original film. Since Lugosi’s role in heavy makeup as Ygor in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, he played a significant number of murderers and mad scientists for poverty-row studios, even appearing as the Big Bad in one of the era’s popular, but low-budget, serials, The Phantom Creeps. The effort to stay afloat financially as a freelancer in Hollywood, part of the personal experience that drove his labor activism, increasingly faltered as he sold his Tudor-style home in the Beachwood Canyon district of the Hollywood Hills and found himself appearing in small and silly roles even as tiny studios graffitied their posters with his name.
In the serial The Phantom Creeps (1939), Lugosi played a scientist who, in a precursor to the Bond villain archetypes, creates various death rays, murderous gadgets, and a killer robot (the titular creeping phantom) that he hopes to sell to the highest bidder among the international market of warring powers. The serials, which introduced a generation of Saturday matinee-goers to “Commando Cody and the Rocket Men” or heroes they knew previously from radio and comics like “The Shadow” and the “Green Hornet,” can be enjoyed today for their peculiarity and vivid, if simple-minded, melodrama. But, amid playground dialogue and cliffhanger plotting, Lugosi must have suffered as he remembered his days as a rising star in Budapest.
In 1942, Lugosi appeared in a propaganda/espionage/horror mash-up rushed into production soon after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Black Dragons, originally entitled The Yellow Menace, opened with what appears to be the claws of a dragon reaching across a map of the Pacific to threaten the American mainland. This is a peculiar reading of geography. Japan’s war aims included the seizure of American imperial holdings but not an invasion of the boundaries of the United States.
Black Dragons tells a different story, and, given his political leanings, Lugosi likely appreciated the plot. The Black Dragon Society, a secret arm of the Japanese emperor, takes on the identities of major American industrialists with the help of a Nazi plastic surgeon (played by Lugosi). But the Black Dragons even betray their Nazi ally and imprison him since he’s the only one who knows of their sinister conspiracy. A convoluted plot point has Lugosi play both the original Nazi scientist who returns to kill the Black Dragons and a Japanese spy who himself receives plastic surgery so he can return to Germany with the Führer none the wiser.
There’s not much of interest in the film aside from its context. Although something of an artifact of the Hollywood left, Black Dragons contains as much race-baiting as warnings about the possibly traitorous intentions of corporate America. Anti-Asian slurs are tossed around thoughtlessly in a film purportedly about dangers to democracy. Lugosi is the only thing worth watching in the film today as he drifts ominously through the scenes, the intensity of his eyes a hypnotic frightmare.
After Lugosi’s years of exile on poverty row, many expected that Universal would ask the fading star to reprise his most famous role two years later in House of Dracula (1944). Instead, they picked John Carradine for what turned out to be a minor role for the titular monster. After World War II, Lugosi, like several of Hollywood’s B- and C-list actors, became popular in summertime stage productions. He would appear as Dracula in stage plays that ran in Denver, Colorado, or Reading, Pennsylvania. As Hoover’s investigation sputtered to a halt, the summer of ’48 found Lugosi playing a one-week engagement at the Norwich Theatre and Masonic Temple in New London, Connecticut. The year 1947 became the first since 1931 that Lugosi did not work on a film set.
In 1948, Universal proffered him a role in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though as the title of the film suggests, it’s a rather small one. Lugosi insisted to Hollywood Digest that his role in the film contained “no burlesque” and that “his trademark would be unblemished.” The film did rake it in for Universal at the box office. But not unlike the success of 1931’s Dracula, it did not lead to Lugosi being offered more significant work in the long term.
Lugosi’s long struggle with alcohol and drug addiction are well known. He became one of the first American celebrities to speak openly, and very bravely, about this when he sought treatment. By the 1950s, as he worked less and less and in smaller and odder roles, he unfortunately became something of a joke in an industry with a notoriously short memory of its stars. But he never stopped working completely and this tells us something about how the American taste for horror had changed since the days when the “weird mystery” offered pleasure to a relatively small, mostly older, and mostly male group of pulp magazine aficionados.
During the Second World War, Lugosi became the president of the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, an organization largely focused on the ouster of Hungary’s decidedly undemocratic regime. During this same period, he wrote a series of articles for the leftist Hungarian journal Magyar Jövő, or “Hungarian Future,” that evoke the revolutionary ideals of 1919. Lugosi’s leftist activities during the period before the Los Angeles rally included appearing on a Brooklyn radio show called The Voice of Fighting Spain, which had its roots in the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War and received its funding from the Communist Party front organization that called itself the Institute for International Democracy.
Lugosi’s affiliations would have attracted some attention even in the midst of a war in which the United States counted the Soviet Union as one of its two major, and certainly its most powerful, allies. The Office of Strategic Services, transformed at the beginning of the Cold War into the Central Intelligence Agency, opened a file on Lugosi. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the congressional power brokers fueling the post–World War II Red Scare and incidents such as the persecution of the Hollywood Ten, appointed a small group of operatives to keep an eye on him. They called themselves the Dracula council. They appear to have lost interest in Lugosi’s leftist sympathies given the much more pressing matter of winning a war against the Axis.
In 1947 the combination of the National Security Act and the acceptance of the doctrine of “containment” acted as charters for the launch of America’s Cold War. In that year, a man few Americans wanted to take an interest in them turned a baleful eye on Lugosi.
In that year, a man few Americans wanted to take an interest in them turned a baleful eye on Lugosi.J. Edgar Hoover made his bones in the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI’s forerunner. In 1919, at age twenty-four, he headed the bureau’s General Intelligence Division, christened the Radical Division given Hoover’s interest in ferreting out real and perceived revolutionary parties in the
United States. Hoover became convinced that the shadow of Trotsky loomed behind every labor organizer, that every one of the era’s large strikes presaged an American Petrograd. By the 1940s, the FBI essentially functioned as his personal police force and spy network. Agents assembled thick files on major and minor figures in entertainment, politics, and the arts who held the vaguest of liberal sympathies. Hoover’s interest in the former communist from Hungary with the thick Magyar accent seems entirely predictable.
Hoover ordered the Los Angeles office to open an investigation into Lugosi, “concerning his activities.” This phrase, in Hoover-speak, meant that agents should pore over every aspect of the public and private life of their subject. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service also looked into the possibility of revoking his citizenship.
Other emerging voices in horror and science fiction faced similar investigations for their left-wing views. Peter Lorre proved a special target because of his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, the German communist playwright who strongly supported a failed 1919 revolution in his country. Like Lugosi, Lorre came from Hungary, but before he fled Nazi terror, he starred as one of cinema’s first serial murderers in Fritz Lang’s M. Automatically becoming the heavy in films ranging from pitch-black noir dramas to Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, he soon became a natural choice for horror films.
Lorre earned Hoover’s ire after publicly supporting the Hollywood Ten, a group of left-leaning screenwriters singled out by Congress’s HUAC for refusing to cooperate with their investigation. Hoover launched Operation COMPIC (Communist Infiltration—Motion Picture Industry) while segregationist John E. Rankin of Mississippi lead the charge against Hollywood as “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.” In response, Lorre joined a radio program effort called Hollywood Fights Back. Despite stars like Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, and John Huston participating in the effort, smearing someone red had a chilling effect on their career.
Vincent Price, whose star began to rise in Hollywood in 1945, had yet to become as deeply identified with horror films as he would after House of Wax (1953). Most did know the young, handsome actor’s left-leaning politics and willingness to talk openly about them. This attracted FBI attention, but the actor had leaned hard right in the thirties, when many Americans went to the opposite end of the political spectrum. Price said he came to his senses in 1938 after watching the gears of Hitler’s death machine begin to grind. Still, Price remained more circumspect than most in supporting liberal and anti-fascist efforts that had little or no ties to American communists.
Several figures who continue to shape the American tradition of horror, fantasy, and science fiction received the FBI’s unwonted concern. Ray Bradbury, with his tales of an America perpetually facing a thing at the top of the stairs, had forty pages of material assembled by agents who suspected his then-genial liberalism hid communist sympathies.(13) The report included the contention that “he has been described as being critical of the United States government.” In a memo, now available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the FBI copied their colleagues at the CIA, violating the agencies’ proscription against surveillance and investigation of private American citizens. Large portions of Bradbury’s file are redacted, but what we can read makes clear that the FBI worried that the author planned to travel to Cuba and take part in a writer’s conference “whose [sic] goal of action is to obtain unity in the fight against anti-imperialism.”
What interested the FBI in Bradbury to begin with, particularly given that his file admits “there is no evidence” he ever “ joined the CP”? For the FBI, the idea that Bradbury suggested in The Martian Chronicles that humans came to the red planet as “despoilers and not developers” sounded a bit too much like a critique of imperial America, both in its frontier past and Cold War present.
Much of the case rested on the word of a former communist turned government snitch named Martin K. Berkeley, who claimed that Bradbury supported the Screen Actors Guild because of sympathy for “its more pro-communist elements.” Berkeley insisted he heard Bradbury describe writers who caved to McCarthyism as “cowards” and that Bradbury’s stories “had been definitely slanted against the United States and its capitalistic system.” Indeed, the informant warned that science fiction itself “may be a lucrative field for the transmission of Communist ideologies.” Too many science fiction writers, he warned Bradbury’s investigators, shared pro-communist views with “a small number of scientists” who believed a war with the Soviet Union would be “threatening to the isolation (existence?) of the universe.” (14)
What other information did the FBI have on the prominent writer, the poet of dark carnivals? After a ten-year investigation of Bradbury, it seemed investigators uncovered one clear communist connection when an unnamed informant (likely Berkeley, again) claimed Bradbury planned to attend an “anti-imperialist” writers congress being held in Havana, Cuba. In fact, a Roy Bradbury, possibly the source of a misprint of Ray Bradbury’s name in his FBI file, had been invited to the gathering. After keeping tabs on Bradbury almost since the end of World War II, the FBI quietly dropped the case.
Isaac Asimov also received Hoover’s attention. As Olive Beck has described in unpublished research on the topic, Asimov, who joined Robert A. Heinlein and Bradbury as leading writers of science fiction after World War II, faced a rather more sinister set of charges. A practicing scientist in the biochemistry department at Boston University, he came under scrutiny for possibly aiding the Soviet espionage networks that had ferreted out secrets of the A-bomb. The FBI long believed that an academic leaked scientific secrets to the Soviets, a figure they referred to as ROBPROF. The basis for the code name seems to have been Asimov’s own work as the author of I, Robot.
The only information the FBI found that pointed to Asimov concerned a list compiled by the Communist Party USA (“The CPUSA underground,” a bureau memo ominously called the tiny organization) of Boston-area figures who might be “possibly amenable” to membership. Asimov remained under investigation for two years, even with no other evidence surfacing. While not as long under surveillance as other figures in the world of fantasy and horror, it’s notable that the FBI shadowed Asimov for espionage and high treason, a capital crime.
[F]ew in the world of horror and science fiction carried as strong a resume on the left as Lugosi…But few in the world of horror and science fiction carried as strong a resume on the left as Lugosi. It did not help that the Hungarian Communist Party made significant gains in summer parliamentary elections, the major step in the country falling into Stalin’s grip and becoming part of the Warsaw Pact. Lugosi’s case had been dropped by the time of his death, and in fact, Hoover and the immigration authorities dropped the matter much more quickly than Bradbury’s, perhaps because of the latter’s growing fame and influence.
Moreover, the investigation of Lugosi revealed nothing that did not already exist in the public record. No evidence emerged that Lugosi ever joined the CPUSA. His file would include his Magyar Jövő articles and the fact that he subscribed to a fund supporting labor leader Harry Bridges in a legal struggle to prevent the federal government from stripping him of his citizenship and deporting him. In line with the FBI’s desire to collect personal dirt on its subjects in case it needed to besmirch their reputation later, one of his agents included in his report that Lugosi appeared “intoxicated most of the time.” (17)
Dirty tricks are the companion of dirty wars. The need to keep track of Lugosi’s drinking habits along with his politics became a standard part of the bureau’s internal security apparatus. Former director James Comey has described, for example, “the darkest chapter” in the bureau’s history as the sending of a package to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 that contained a set of recordings of his extramarital transgressions and a typed note urging him to kill himself within the month.
Clearly, horror would have a role in an emerging national security state such as this one. But would it distract a populace restive under the reigns of the growing hegemony of the Pentagon, Hollywood, and industry? Or would it become a spectral light revealing that mad scientists had taken charge of the American experience? Horror was about to meet the bomb.
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