“You want to save me, noble suitors,” I cried in what for me was close to a swooning soprano, “do not destroy each other. I love you both.”
Well, there. I’d introduced a logical impossibility into the plot of every film either “man” had ever acted in.
In confusion, Lon Chaney Jr. morphed into his Mummy persona.
“Oh, Karis,” I said, pressing a restraining hand on his blood-smudged chest wrappings. “He is but an old man, a figure of fun, not a rival.”
At which, Lon Chaney Sr. obligingly changed into one of his demented clown personas.
This is when I discovered that the female love interest is the queen of the board, the key to every plot of every originally cheesy melodramatic script these film legends had appeared in. She was lovely, she was engaged, she was a swooning wimp, and they ached to own her love, but always lost out to a fine, stalwart, handsome, ordinary human man.
In some ways, the life and loves of Lon Chaney and his son Creighton, who would resurface as Lon Chaney Jr., much to his embarrassment and shame, were as much at stake here as any misunderstood film monster’s fate.
I was getting a lot of melodrama whiplash keeping these legendary actors and their roles apart when a woman’s voice came to my rescue.
*
“Stop. Stop! I won’t be caught between you! I won’t be the maiden victim again and again. I won’t be silent. I will sing. I’d rather die than be torn between the two of you. Monsters! I am a nightingale and I will not be caged.”
A pretty woman wearing a pale, long gown now stood among us, a figure of hysterical anguish.
She threw back her slim soprano’s neck and lifted an even slimmer glass vial to her gray silver-screen lips. A thin stream of mercury slid oysterlike down her throat. Then she screamed, screeched, writhed, clutching her vocal cords as they corroded and cracked, and vanished along with her ability to make any sound.
“You did this,” the Wolfman snarled at the Phantom. “You told me she was dead, that I had no mother. But the mercury poison destroyed her vocal cords, not her life.”
“Her vocal cords were her life!” How odd to see the Phantom of the Opera scorning a woman for using her gift, but the character had been a control freak too. “Cleva wanted to perform, and you were a young boy, Creighton,” the Phantom argued. “You needed a mother with you, not one off in nightclubs singing for far less than emperors.”
“Creighton. That was her surname,” Larry Talbot remembered, “given to me as her firstborn. She tried to kill herself because of you.”
“I had theatrical work, boy, a rising career! Cleva refused to give up her singing to stay with you.”
“Others could have tended me. They already had.”
“Yes, her voice was sublime, beyond incredibly sweet.”
“And it never was so again. You cared nothing for her gift, her talent, so she seared it from her throat in front of you,” the Wolfman said with a guttural whine of pain. “And then you told me she was dead. I was just a boy of seven. You kept us apart for years until she found me again.”
“Once you knew of her existence, you left me, Creighton. You went off with her.”
“Which was fine with you. You never wanted me to go on the stage, on the screen, as you never wanted her to sing. She destroyed her gift in her pain at your not valuing it. Or her.”
“You called yourself ‘Lon’ and tacked a ‘Jr.’ on your name at the order of the studio bosses after I was dead.”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be my own man, as my mother wanted to be her own woman, but your legend mired us both in paths that hurt us.”
“I didn’t put the bichloride of mercury in her hand.”
“You put the despair in her soul.”
“Our divorce was overdue.”
“As I was born prematurely. I guess,” the Wolfman said, straightening into the sad, human, but familiar form of Larry Talbot, “I guess our timing was always off, Dad.”