October 16, 2013 • 29 mins
After her unconventional upbringing, Elsa's career as a performer began to take off in the late 1920s, around the same time she met her husband. But the role that would define her image came in 1935.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm from and I'm Tracy Wilson, and this is part
two of our Elsa Lanchester podcast. We're leading up to
(00:22):
her becoming a Brian of Frankenstein. So, just to recap,
she grew up in very unconventional ways. It's kind of
radical too. Yeah, parents who were in the early nine
Dred's already socialists, vegetarian, anti vaccination atheists, which shaped her
a lot. I think she grew up and became kind
(00:44):
of an unconventional, free spirited woman. Uh. And she had
started a theater in a nightclub in her early twenties. Uh.
And then her acting career started to pick up, which
is kind of where we are coming back in today.
So in Elsa was cast in Arnold in its play Mr.
Pro Hack, and on the first day of rehearsal, she
met Charles Lawton, who would become her husband. My first impression,
(01:08):
she writes in her book, was that he looked like
a baker's assistant who just left a bakery and was
all dusty with flower. Yeah. And at this point Lawton
already had some notoriety as an actor, so he was
kind of like the big name coming into this production
they were working on. And Lanchester's description of their early
relationship really describes one of friendship. Uh. They were kind
(01:31):
of like two misfits finding each other. Lawton, despite uh
being a popular actor, was very lonely. He was considered
ugly um, so he didn't even though he was famous,
he did not really have a lot of romantic prospects.
And Elsa was to bohemian and independent for most men.
(01:53):
She was, you know, a little She wasn't exactly a
shrinking violet. She wasn't a demure coquette. She was a
woman very much in charge of herself in her own
life and it it made finding an equal partner for
her a little bit tricky. And she always wasn't interested
in in long term relationships either. Charles was from a
hotel family. His parents had started out as servants basically
(02:15):
and had built a fortune from nothing um and really
kind of at this point had owned a lot of
hotels and we're very well off. Elsa, ever, the independent,
really struggled. She had some odd feelings. At the beginning
of their friendship and spending time together at the idea
of a man, for example, paying for her meals, but
(02:36):
she kind of negotiated with herself and was able to
kind of let go of that feeling because she knew
that Charles wasn't struggling financially. The two of them went
on long walks together, but it wasn't what you might
think of as like a typical courtship walk. They would
go on these really long walks out in the country,
but sometimes they didn't even talk to each other. Yeah,
(02:58):
for two you know, artistic twentysome things, you would think
it would be a lot of outpouring of feelings and
discussion and mind melding, and they really it was more
of a very quiet companionship, particularly in the beginning and
once they realized that they actually wanted to be together
as a couple. Uh. One of the things and because
her career was becoming more and more successful and she
(03:21):
was in the public eye more, Charles wanted her to
get a proper wardrobe, and this actually caused a fight
between them. She had been largely making her own clothes
at the time, but she was not an especially good seamstress,
and so it showed that they were homemade and so
he wanted her to visit this dressmaker that he knew
of that was clearly out of her price range. Elsa
(03:42):
still felt like she should be paying her own way
in life, but he was insistent about it, and in
her account, she says, Charles finally had to pay and
resented my resentment about it. We never did quite recover
from this financial tennis match about my wardrobe, nor have
I yet recovered from his pressure that I follow his taste.
His ideas and taste were very good, nevertheless, and no
(04:04):
one could resist his enormous enjoyment of a few hours
with the dressmakers. Uh So, And she wrote about this
in the eighties, so decades later she was still kind
of angry about sort of being put in this position
where she felt like she had to depend on a
man for something that she needed. I just think it's
very interesting that she writes about this so much later,
(04:26):
almost sixty years later, she was still kind of fuming
about it. On so they talked about marriage. Charles wanted it,
but Elsa didn't really care, and they were teetering on
the brink of respectability. But at about this time Elsa
became pregnant that they chose to terminate the pregnancy, and
then after this they moved into a flat together, and
(04:49):
then after that they then decided to get married. Yeah.
She talks about a little bit this period in their
lives where um, people treated them as though they were respectable,
and they even would sometimes check into hotels as the
Lawtons and people so I thought they were already married, uh,
And how they kind of felt like they were living
a lie and the pregnancy termination made them feel like
(05:11):
we'd look respectable to people, but we know that we're
really not, and it's all just a big fib and
that probably played into their decision to actually marry uh.
And Lanchester describes their wedding day as a French farce
because both actors were popular enough at this point that
their romance had been covered in the press. Uh. And
though they had arranged to get married on a day
that the registry office was normally closed so that they
(05:34):
could avoid attention, when they were getting ready to leave,
their street was so crowded with journalists that they actually
had to like try laugh in grade kind of juggling
of multiple taxis. They tried to go out at different times, uh,
separately and then at the same time but in separate taxis,
(05:54):
and eventually they shook off enough of the crowd that
they were able to make their way to the ceremony,
and they did make it to the registry and they
were married, and that was on February tenth. Lawton's mother
and his brother went on their honeymoon in Switzerland with them,
which is very odd um And eventually though, Lawton and
(06:14):
Lanchester moved on to Italy for a second stage of
their honeymoon without additional family members. But apparently there was
a good bit of teasing in their social circlet, like
you took your family on your honeymoon with you. Two
years into their marriage, Lawton was forced, due to a
slightly confusing interaction with police, to tell Elsa that he was,
(06:36):
in his words, homosexual. Partly her initial reaction to this
was that that was fine with her, but the deception
was pretty upsetting. She didn't have to have a problem
with his sexual orientation, just with the fact that he'd
been keeping it from her. She claimed to have no
indication prior to this that he had any interested interest
(06:57):
in men, and she hinted that she had tripped ne
did this seemingly sudden change to a midlife crisis. She wrote,
it was his change of life. Yeah. Uh, the the
crazy police interaction. To give a little more flesh to that,
they're the police stopped Lawton. They had a young man
(07:17):
in custody and they thought he was trying to possibly
extort money from Lawton. Uh. And it turned out it
had been someone he had been sexually involved with, and
there was a court case over the young man, and
they had been concerned because they were being covered in
the press. Uh. And somehow some money had changed hands
between Lawton and this gentleman. And but the press and
(07:41):
the judge and the matter handled it all very kindly,
And I think they basically wrote it off as saying
that Lawton was quote he had performed a misguided generosity
in giving this person money. It was a very weird
sort of you know, very um polite and proper handling
of kind of a subject that I think none of
the people involved at the time we're really ready to
(08:03):
deal with. And I just it's I didn't want to
gloss over it, uh completely and not mentioned kind of
what it was. But it is a very hazy, weird
account like what actually went down that actually surprises me
for a number of reasons, given the treatment of other
gay people in UH in Britain at the time, Yeah,
(08:26):
and in entertainment. And I think part of it is
that Lawton was this sort of you know, one he
was highly regarded as an actor and as an artist,
and too he had this sort of sweet, bumbling way
about him in some ways. And I think part of
it is just that people didn't believe any of this
could be the case. You know, it was kind of
one of those maybe, but it's hard for me to
(08:48):
believe that this man would be involved in anything untoward,
and so I think that was part of why they
kind of got a very kind and gentle treatment in
the whole thing. So their marriage, though continued even though
it had problems, problems even aside from Lawton's indiscretions, and
Charles would allegedly sometimes bully Elsa if he was unhappy
(09:08):
in his work UH, and she felt that when her
career was thriving, that he would become jealous and would
kind of be a little bit mean to her. That
two of them moved to Hollywood not long after Lawton's
play payment deferred clothes and he was signed to a
picture alongside Gary Cooper and to Lula Bank had called
The Devil and the Deep. They arrived in California before
(09:29):
the movie's script was ready, so he was loaned to
James Wales's project, The Old Dark House. And as Lawton's
Hollywood career continued, Lanchester's acting career really sputtered. She wasn't
working at the time and it was making her a
little bit crazy. Uh. And she eventually went back home
to London, and the years following this we're really filled
(09:52):
with a lot of back and forth travel. They were
both working and acting in both film and theater, and
they would just go back to London, go back to California.
It was a very sort of transient life they were living. Uh.
And in the early nineties MGM offered Lanchester a contract
uh and it kicked off a very busy decade for her,
(10:12):
and of course smack Dab in the middle of that
decade was the role that made her an icon, which
was The Bride. And now we will get into The
Bride of Frankenstein. During a stint in London in which
she really missed Charles and she felt overwhelmed at taking
care of both their flat in the city and their
country home, Elsa was offered the role of the bride
(10:35):
of Frankenstein by the director himself. He had danced the
Tango with the Cave of Harmony back in the day,
and he and Elsa had remained friends throughout the years. Yeah,
and James Whale, who directed Um Brandon, Frankensteini and Frankenstein,
had also, you may recall, been working with Lawton on
another picture in the early thirties, and whales first Frankenstein
(10:56):
picture had really made Boris Karloff a household name, so
getting to work on the follow up was exciting exciting
for Elsa, but she was also really excited that the
script actually had two parts for her. The bride, of course,
but at the beginning of the picture she also plays
Mary Shelley, and she describes that character as quote dressed
extremely elegantly, sweeter than sugar, and some screenings the early
(11:20):
part of the film is cut, so not everybody who's
ever seen it has been treated to else's Mary Shelley performance.
The idea that Wale was working with was that there
must be something dark inside such a woman to make
her be able to come up with a story like Frankenstein,
so he wanted the same actress to appear both as
the seemingly delicate Shelly and the seemingly monstrous bride. And
(11:44):
while the role made her famous, if you watch the movie,
she really doesn't have all that much screen time in it.
All the same, the time that she did spend on
set was grueling by all accounts, at least the segments
where she was filming as the bride. The Mary Shelley
Prologue only took a few days to film, and Elsa
(12:04):
was just charmed by the costume that she wore for
this segment, and it had this really intricate handworked and
sequence embroidery. It was a long and white dress, but
it had a delicate, refined hint at the look that
the bride would have later on in the film. Yeah,
and it's uh. I remember reading a um a film
(12:25):
history account that described to the bride as being evocative
of both a burial shroud and a wedding night nightgown.
Just something I had not thought about that much until
I read that, and I just loved it. So filming
The Monster's Bride took ten a week to ten days
to film, according to Lanchester's recollection. Uh, and it was
(12:48):
a really uncomfortable affair for many, many reasons. Her hair
was built up over this horsehair and wire cage that
was anchored onto four arrow braid tracks tight around her head. Yeah,
so similar to the way hair extensions are put in.
These braided tracks were run along the top of her
scalp and then they would sow the cage into that
(13:11):
for the day, uh, comb her hair up around it,
and then add those two white streaks those are hair pieces.
Her makeup would take three to four hours to do
each day, and the makeup artist, Jack Pierce, who uh
it was an interesting character himself, would work in silence.
He would be slowly layering on putty and pigment, and
(13:32):
he was intolerant of interruption or chatter. She wasn't allowed
to speak to him first, like he If he said
good morning to her, she could say it back, but
if he didn't greet her, she just had to sit
in the chair and get the makeup app life and
he wore a lab coat the whole time. He was
almost like his own. Dr Frankenston, a studio nurse, would
wind elsa into her bandages every day, and she drank
(13:54):
as little fluid as possible while shooting because going to
the bathroom was just such an or deal with all
these bandages on. Yeah. She also mentioned in her book
that she Emboris Karlof didn't like to go to the
commissary during meal breaks because they didn't like being stared
at because they both looked so completely bizarre in their
costumes that Karloff, who didn't like to miss meals, apparently
(14:17):
would wear like a cheese cloth veil and go down
to the commissary and like lift the veil to pop
food in. That seems weirder than showing up in your makeup. Yeah,
but when you think about what that makeup looked like,
and it was in the nineteen thirties when backlots were
probably more filled with people trying to look pretty and cute, Uh,
you could see her, it would be weird. But the
(14:38):
shroud does, Like having a shroudy cheese cloth of ale
while you eat your meals does seem odd as well.
I don't know. I think there's no winning in that
point in the shot where the bandages come off from
her eyes and they pop open as she looks around.
She wasn't supposed to blink, so she'd have to open
her eyes as wide as she possibly could and and
(15:00):
keep them open, which really caused her a lot of
pain as the day war on. Yeah, each day of shooting.
By the end of it, she was really in a
lot of pain. Uh. And then all the screaming that
she did throughout uh, because it's pretty much what she
does as the bride really took such a toll on
her throat that she was left unable to speak for
(15:20):
several days after the shoot, and she was even prescribed
coding for the pain because it had really ravaged her
throat quite badly. So all of these tribulations aside as
often happens with really grueling movie set stories. She spoke
very fondly ever time on the set with Wale, and
for those two weeks of filming, she became just a
really indelible part of the cinema's history. Yeah. And as
(15:45):
an aside, I love when people first see Brida Frankenstein
and they have that charming revelation that it's actually somewhat
of a comedy. I don't know if you've ever sat
through it in a theater, but you have these moments.
There's a few characters, particularly at the beginning, that are
played very broadly and kind of for laughs, and it's
fun to kind of look around and watch people go
(16:06):
I thought I was seeing a classic horror film kind
and they're like, but it's funny, the horror comedy. There's
there's funny in it. I really love that film. It's
so beautiful and so fun to watch, and I love
the the play of contrasts. It's just gorgeous. But rather
(16:27):
than wax rapsodic about how much I love the bride
at Frankenstein, shall we get back to Elsa now? Of course?
So she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars twice
in her career. The first was in ninety nine for
her role Income to the Stable, and then again in
seven for Witness for the Prosecution, which was her last
picture with her husband. Yeah, she and Charles Lawton did
(16:50):
a lot of projects together. She tried to keep her
career separate from his, but there were times when it
would work out or they wanted to be together. Uh,
you know, because they really did are very deeply about
each other. Even though they had had this revelation early
on in their marriage that he was gay, they still
really seemed to build this life together and were very
(17:10):
devoted to one another, so sometimes they would try to
work on the same projects, and throughout this time, Elsa
would continue to sing and dance in cabaret style shows.
She really never lost her love of performing live theater,
and she would sometimes two are in tandem with Charles.
He did a couple of book tours, and she would
try to set up cabaret tours that would follow the
same path as him. They became American citizens in nineteen fifty,
(17:34):
after having gotten lots of criticism back home for staying
in the United States during World War Two. According to Elsa,
Charles would often tell her, I was in the First
World War in the trenches bayonetting men and getting gassed.
I think once in a life is enough. Yeah, I
could see not wanting to do that again. The parents
(17:55):
stayed married, As I said, they were really quite devoted
to each other until Charles died into member of nineteen
sixty two, and he had had a really prolonged battle
with cancer. His lengthy treatments had really eaten a way
at the couple's finances, so when he died it wasn't
like she was left with a lot of money. She
had a small allowance that they had arranged after a
(18:16):
lot of legal sorting of his assets. Uh and there
was a pretty significant art collection that had to be
dealt with. But she needed to fiscally or support her
ailing mother who was back in London, and she needed
to supplement her income, so she started working in television series.
Uh and at that point, the one that she was
working on was The John Prescith Show. And she would
(18:39):
send funds to her mother Biddy regularly, and she really
often had throughout her life. Sadly, one of her cousins
thought that she had just abandoned her mother for Hollywood
and just wrote scathing letters accusing her of negligence. Yeah,
she uh prints she reprints those letters in her autobiography
and they really are just super mean, really accusing her
(19:00):
of basically being of extremely shallow and low character and
that she's just been, you know, completely entranced by Hollywood,
and and that clearly all she cares about is being
famous and important and she doesn't have any regard for family,
and that it's basically like, you're a horrible person. You're
so horrible and shallow, I hate you. And she just
keeps getting these letters. They're awful, but eventually, four years
(19:24):
after Charles died, Biddy also passed away. Uh. And it's
interesting because she did financially support her mother a great deal,
but also it was quite clear in all of her
writings that she never really liked her mother, though she
kept trying to, and she's, you know, pretty self reflective
about it. And it's like, I recognize that many people
say were a lot of light and that may be
(19:45):
a significant part of why we never really had a
meeting in the minds. Uh and her father had actually
died in the nineteen forties, but they weren't terribly close
and it wasn't something she really dwelled upon. Um. I
don't think she mentions it in her book until after
Biddy dies, where she's like, oh, yeah, Shamus had already
died like twenty years before that, and it's pretty glossy.
So even though she had this ongoing relationship with her
(20:08):
parents in a very interesting childhood and early adulthood where
she was still with them, she does seem to have
had some emotional separation from them, like she never she
didn't maintain a closeness with her family. Her career continued
through the eighties and primarily involved appearances on TV, and
a lot of roles in Disney films. She played Katie
(20:31):
Nanna in the opening scenes of Mary Poppins Yeah, which
a lot of people don't recognize her. She's much older
at that point, and she is for anyone who has
only vague recollection of that film, she is the nanny
at the very beginning who loses the children and because
the children ran away from her in the park and
she's quitting her job the big Suffragette song number at
the beginning. So that was really like the latter part
(20:55):
of her career. That was those last two decades where
spent mostly doing small parts on television, UM and in
these Disney films. UH. But then as she was getting older,
of course, she suffered two strokes in and UH. In
nineteen eighty six she contracted bronchial pneumonia and she died
at the end of that year, on December six, when
(21:16):
she was eighty four. At the time, she wrote of
her life, it was felicitous to be born in nineteen
o two. Anyone born around that time he had a
jackpot era. That is, if they lived through the two wars, science,
medicine and the arts. In this century tumbled over each
other at such speed that our human span of three
score years and ten seems more like living two hundred years. Yeah,
(21:41):
she was pretty, uh, kind of turned on by the
development of of culture and science and how quickly she
was watching technology develop and industry change. Uh. When it
came to talking about the Bride later in her life,
Lanchester once wrote that the quickest way to make her
shut up was to ask her about the Bride of Frankenstein,
(22:01):
because she was a very talkative and loquacious woman. And
in her books she says to this day, nine out
of ten photographs I get in the mail for autographing
or of the bride, I'm grateful for the Bride of Frankenstein.
It became a sort of trademark for me. But such
trademarks can cause typecasting and boomerang for some actors. Such
actors work all the time, some like it, some grumble.
(22:25):
Perhaps even more grateful for her turn in Frankenstein's sequel
are fans of horror and classic cinema. There's this just
instantly recognizable image of the bride, and that has been
all over all kinds of memorabilia. It's been made into dolls.
This year. It's part of a marketing campaign for for
Matt Cosmetics based around a line of products develops with
(22:47):
developed with effects artists Rick Baker, And like that clip
of her screaming, it's just everywhere it is. It's it
shows up in all kinds of pop culture references. It's
been mimt eyes, It'll show up in your Facebook feed periodically.
It really is quite a h an iconic to the
(23:09):
point that people who have never ever seen that movie,
and a lot of people haven't because it is quite
old and you don't always get to screenings, but it's, uh,
everybody knows that it's the Bride of Frankenstein without I
can't think of anybody who's ever seen it and gone,
what's that? Um, it's just instantly knowable. Uh. I remember
wanting to dress as her for Halloween one time when
(23:32):
I was a child, and I can't remember if I
actually got to do it or not. Like I remember
my mom being like that hair is the hair is
always what holds people back because I I've always had
extremely fine hair. I was like, that is not ever
going to take on your head well in wigs or
even tricky, you know. I don't know if the legs
don't always work right. I don't know if they had
(23:54):
Brad Frankenstein wigs for seven years the early eighties. I
guess that was early he might. Uh. There is also
a fan driven effort underway at the moment to get
the Motion Picture and Television Fund, which is the MPTF
to reprint else's autobiography. Um, if you're interested in investigating
(24:14):
that cause or adding your voice to it, you can
google reprint Elsa and you'll get to all the pertinent
sites and information. That effort is also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash reprint Elsa. And for me, it
was one of those things that when I found out
that people were trying to get reprinted, I was in
in a minute because she really is uh so fun
to read, even though and she knew so many interesting
(24:36):
people throughout her life, and she recalls with a great
deal of clarity some of these really fascinating interactions. Uh,
it's just a fun read even if you weren't interested
in Elsa Lanchester. I think her wit uh makes the
story of her life very fun and kind of enjoyable. Uh.
It is dense, though it's a lot of Uh, it's
(24:58):
a lot of book. I mean, it's not like a
fluffy read. There's a lot of interesting information there. Do
you have some listener mail for ends? I do, indeed,
and uh I did not check with this listener on pronunciation.
I don't know if his name is Josiah or Josiah,
because I know people that have done in both ways.
And he says, first off, let me say I love
the show. I had a decent amount of physics in college,
(25:19):
and I thought I may be able to shed some
light on the Vixen radar system and how it worked.
He's referring to the Louis Alpharez podcast. The basic principle
is that, in general, the closer you are to a
radio wave transmission, the stronger the signal you will receive.
So as an airplane approached a U boat, each successive
transmission of radio waves a ping, if you will, would
be stronger. Alvarez and company brilliantly designed a system that,
(25:42):
after initially detecting a submarine, would reduce the power of
each successive ping by a certain ratio, so while the
plane was actually getting closer and closer, the strength of
the radar transmission would actually get weaker, making it appear
as though it's going away from the target boat that
my athematical complications arise from the fact that the intensity
of a wave is inversely proportional to the square of
(26:05):
its radius. I did not fact check that of just
trusting you um in a simple example, ignoring some of
the more complicated behavior of waves. If you have the
distance between yourself and the target, reducing your radio power
to one quarter of its original strength will make you
appear stationary. The signal reaching the target will be the
same strength, even though you are much closer. Taking this
(26:28):
a step further, have the distance and reduce ratio power
by an eighth, and you will in effect appear to
be twice as far away. A slightly better explanation, he says,
would involve a whiteboard. But maybe this will help a little. Uh,
it doesn't make sense mathematically well. And I was hampered
a little bit and doing some of the research for
that episode because a lot of what I was reading
(26:48):
was definitely written for other physicist And when I started
trying to look up how to better explain multiple things
in the episode, there were there were some things that
I was able to come up with, like a lay
person's explanation for pretty quickly, and then others where I
just kept finding densely tynical explanations that were beyond my
(27:11):
ability to understand. So I am super happy that we
got a listener's thoughts on It was a really good
way to explain it, because I did not have time
to read an entire manual on Radar long. And I know, uh,
I and probably many other people, I really love science,
but I do get kind of watted up in a
little confused sometimes by the mathematics involved, and uh, some
(27:35):
of the more esoteric concepts I have to really kind
of fight my way in to get a handle on them.
So it's nice when it's laid out so nicely in uh,
normal people speak. So if you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcasts at
Discovery dot com, or you can visit us on Facebook
dot com slash history class stuff. We're on Twitter at
(27:56):
missed in History. You can also find us on Pinterest
in anyway all the things. If you would like to
learn more about what we've talked about today, you can
go to our website and type in for Frankenstein in
the search bar, and you will get a number of
different things, including how Frankenstein's Monster Works, and uh another
one called quiz called how well do you know Frankenstein's Monster?
(28:19):
It was very, very fun. How Frankenstein's Monster Works was
written by Robert Lamb who's on Stuff to bow your Mind,
and it's a really cool examination of literally how are
reanimated human that has been pieced together could scientifically work.
There's really fun stuff in it. I highly recommend it.
If you'd looks learn more about that or anything else
(28:40):
you can think of, you should do that at our website,
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm from and I'm Tracy Wilson, and this is part
two of our Elsa Lanchester podcast. We're leading up to
(00:22):
her becoming a Brian of Frankenstein. So, just to recap,
she grew up in very unconventional ways. It's kind of
radical too. Yeah, parents who were in the early nine
Dred's already socialists, vegetarian, anti vaccination atheists, which shaped her
a lot. I think she grew up and became kind
(00:44):
of an unconventional, free spirited woman. Uh. And she had
started a theater in a nightclub in her early twenties. Uh.
And then her acting career started to pick up, which
is kind of where we are coming back in today.
So in Elsa was cast in Arnold in its play Mr.
Pro Hack, and on the first day of rehearsal, she
met Charles Lawton, who would become her husband. My first impression,
(01:08):
she writes in her book, was that he looked like
a baker's assistant who just left a bakery and was
all dusty with flower. Yeah. And at this point Lawton
already had some notoriety as an actor, so he was
kind of like the big name coming into this production
they were working on. And Lanchester's description of their early
relationship really describes one of friendship. Uh. They were kind
(01:31):
of like two misfits finding each other. Lawton, despite uh
being a popular actor, was very lonely. He was considered
ugly um, so he didn't even though he was famous,
he did not really have a lot of romantic prospects.
And Elsa was to bohemian and independent for most men.
(01:53):
She was, you know, a little She wasn't exactly a
shrinking violet. She wasn't a demure coquette. She was a
woman very much in charge of herself in her own
life and it it made finding an equal partner for
her a little bit tricky. And she always wasn't interested
in in long term relationships either. Charles was from a
hotel family. His parents had started out as servants basically
(02:15):
and had built a fortune from nothing um and really
kind of at this point had owned a lot of
hotels and we're very well off. Elsa, ever, the independent,
really struggled. She had some odd feelings. At the beginning
of their friendship and spending time together at the idea
of a man, for example, paying for her meals, but
(02:36):
she kind of negotiated with herself and was able to
kind of let go of that feeling because she knew
that Charles wasn't struggling financially. The two of them went
on long walks together, but it wasn't what you might
think of as like a typical courtship walk. They would
go on these really long walks out in the country,
but sometimes they didn't even talk to each other. Yeah,
(02:58):
for two you know, artistic twentysome things, you would think
it would be a lot of outpouring of feelings and
discussion and mind melding, and they really it was more
of a very quiet companionship, particularly in the beginning and
once they realized that they actually wanted to be together
as a couple. Uh. One of the things and because
her career was becoming more and more successful and she
(03:21):
was in the public eye more, Charles wanted her to
get a proper wardrobe, and this actually caused a fight
between them. She had been largely making her own clothes
at the time, but she was not an especially good seamstress,
and so it showed that they were homemade and so
he wanted her to visit this dressmaker that he knew
of that was clearly out of her price range. Elsa
(03:42):
still felt like she should be paying her own way
in life, but he was insistent about it, and in
her account, she says, Charles finally had to pay and
resented my resentment about it. We never did quite recover
from this financial tennis match about my wardrobe, nor have
I yet recovered from his pressure that I follow his taste.
His ideas and taste were very good, nevertheless, and no
(04:04):
one could resist his enormous enjoyment of a few hours
with the dressmakers. Uh So, And she wrote about this
in the eighties, so decades later she was still kind
of angry about sort of being put in this position
where she felt like she had to depend on a
man for something that she needed. I just think it's
very interesting that she writes about this so much later,
(04:26):
almost sixty years later, she was still kind of fuming
about it. On so they talked about marriage. Charles wanted it,
but Elsa didn't really care, and they were teetering on
the brink of respectability. But at about this time Elsa
became pregnant that they chose to terminate the pregnancy, and
then after this they moved into a flat together, and
(04:49):
then after that they then decided to get married. Yeah.
She talks about a little bit this period in their
lives where um, people treated them as though they were respectable,
and they even would sometimes check into hotels as the
Lawtons and people so I thought they were already married, uh,
And how they kind of felt like they were living
a lie and the pregnancy termination made them feel like
(05:11):
we'd look respectable to people, but we know that we're
really not, and it's all just a big fib and
that probably played into their decision to actually marry uh.
And Lanchester describes their wedding day as a French farce
because both actors were popular enough at this point that
their romance had been covered in the press. Uh. And
though they had arranged to get married on a day
that the registry office was normally closed so that they
(05:34):
could avoid attention, when they were getting ready to leave,
their street was so crowded with journalists that they actually
had to like try laugh in grade kind of juggling
of multiple taxis. They tried to go out at different times, uh,
separately and then at the same time but in separate taxis,
(05:54):
and eventually they shook off enough of the crowd that
they were able to make their way to the ceremony,
and they did make it to the registry and they
were married, and that was on February tenth. Lawton's mother
and his brother went on their honeymoon in Switzerland with them,
which is very odd um And eventually though, Lawton and
(06:14):
Lanchester moved on to Italy for a second stage of
their honeymoon without additional family members. But apparently there was
a good bit of teasing in their social circlet, like
you took your family on your honeymoon with you. Two
years into their marriage, Lawton was forced, due to a
slightly confusing interaction with police, to tell Elsa that he was,
(06:36):
in his words, homosexual. Partly her initial reaction to this
was that that was fine with her, but the deception
was pretty upsetting. She didn't have to have a problem
with his sexual orientation, just with the fact that he'd
been keeping it from her. She claimed to have no
indication prior to this that he had any interested interest
(06:57):
in men, and she hinted that she had tripped ne
did this seemingly sudden change to a midlife crisis. She wrote,
it was his change of life. Yeah. Uh, the the
crazy police interaction. To give a little more flesh to that,
they're the police stopped Lawton. They had a young man
(07:17):
in custody and they thought he was trying to possibly
extort money from Lawton. Uh. And it turned out it
had been someone he had been sexually involved with, and
there was a court case over the young man, and
they had been concerned because they were being covered in
the press. Uh. And somehow some money had changed hands
between Lawton and this gentleman. And but the press and
(07:41):
the judge and the matter handled it all very kindly,
And I think they basically wrote it off as saying
that Lawton was quote he had performed a misguided generosity
in giving this person money. It was a very weird
sort of you know, very um polite and proper handling
of kind of a subject that I think none of
the people involved at the time we're really ready to
(08:03):
deal with. And I just it's I didn't want to
gloss over it, uh completely and not mentioned kind of
what it was. But it is a very hazy, weird
account like what actually went down that actually surprises me
for a number of reasons, given the treatment of other
gay people in UH in Britain at the time, Yeah,
(08:26):
and in entertainment. And I think part of it is
that Lawton was this sort of you know, one he
was highly regarded as an actor and as an artist,
and too he had this sort of sweet, bumbling way
about him in some ways. And I think part of
it is just that people didn't believe any of this
could be the case. You know, it was kind of
one of those maybe, but it's hard for me to
(08:48):
believe that this man would be involved in anything untoward,
and so I think that was part of why they
kind of got a very kind and gentle treatment in
the whole thing. So their marriage, though continued even though
it had problems, problems even aside from Lawton's indiscretions, and
Charles would allegedly sometimes bully Elsa if he was unhappy
(09:08):
in his work UH, and she felt that when her
career was thriving, that he would become jealous and would
kind of be a little bit mean to her. That
two of them moved to Hollywood not long after Lawton's
play payment deferred clothes and he was signed to a
picture alongside Gary Cooper and to Lula Bank had called
The Devil and the Deep. They arrived in California before
(09:29):
the movie's script was ready, so he was loaned to
James Wales's project, The Old Dark House. And as Lawton's
Hollywood career continued, Lanchester's acting career really sputtered. She wasn't
working at the time and it was making her a
little bit crazy. Uh. And she eventually went back home
to London, and the years following this we're really filled
(09:52):
with a lot of back and forth travel. They were
both working and acting in both film and theater, and
they would just go back to London, go back to California.
It was a very sort of transient life they were living. Uh.
And in the early nineties MGM offered Lanchester a contract
uh and it kicked off a very busy decade for her,
(10:12):
and of course smack Dab in the middle of that
decade was the role that made her an icon, which
was The Bride. And now we will get into The
Bride of Frankenstein. During a stint in London in which
she really missed Charles and she felt overwhelmed at taking
care of both their flat in the city and their
country home, Elsa was offered the role of the bride
(10:35):
of Frankenstein by the director himself. He had danced the
Tango with the Cave of Harmony back in the day,
and he and Elsa had remained friends throughout the years. Yeah,
and James Whale, who directed Um Brandon, Frankensteini and Frankenstein,
had also, you may recall, been working with Lawton on
another picture in the early thirties, and whales first Frankenstein
(10:56):
picture had really made Boris Karloff a household name, so
getting to work on the follow up was exciting exciting
for Elsa, but she was also really excited that the
script actually had two parts for her. The bride, of course,
but at the beginning of the picture she also plays
Mary Shelley, and she describes that character as quote dressed
extremely elegantly, sweeter than sugar, and some screenings the early
(11:20):
part of the film is cut, so not everybody who's
ever seen it has been treated to else's Mary Shelley performance.
The idea that Wale was working with was that there
must be something dark inside such a woman to make
her be able to come up with a story like Frankenstein,
so he wanted the same actress to appear both as
the seemingly delicate Shelly and the seemingly monstrous bride. And
(11:44):
while the role made her famous, if you watch the movie,
she really doesn't have all that much screen time in it.
All the same, the time that she did spend on
set was grueling by all accounts, at least the segments
where she was filming as the bride. The Mary Shelley
Prologue only took a few days to film, and Elsa
(12:04):
was just charmed by the costume that she wore for
this segment, and it had this really intricate handworked and
sequence embroidery. It was a long and white dress, but
it had a delicate, refined hint at the look that
the bride would have later on in the film. Yeah,
and it's uh. I remember reading a um a film
(12:25):
history account that described to the bride as being evocative
of both a burial shroud and a wedding night nightgown.
Just something I had not thought about that much until
I read that, and I just loved it. So filming
The Monster's Bride took ten a week to ten days
to film, according to Lanchester's recollection. Uh, and it was
(12:48):
a really uncomfortable affair for many, many reasons. Her hair
was built up over this horsehair and wire cage that
was anchored onto four arrow braid tracks tight around her head. Yeah,
so similar to the way hair extensions are put in.
These braided tracks were run along the top of her
scalp and then they would sow the cage into that
(13:11):
for the day, uh, comb her hair up around it,
and then add those two white streaks those are hair pieces.
Her makeup would take three to four hours to do
each day, and the makeup artist, Jack Pierce, who uh
it was an interesting character himself, would work in silence.
He would be slowly layering on putty and pigment, and
(13:32):
he was intolerant of interruption or chatter. She wasn't allowed
to speak to him first, like he If he said
good morning to her, she could say it back, but
if he didn't greet her, she just had to sit
in the chair and get the makeup app life and
he wore a lab coat the whole time. He was
almost like his own. Dr Frankenston, a studio nurse, would
wind elsa into her bandages every day, and she drank
(13:54):
as little fluid as possible while shooting because going to
the bathroom was just such an or deal with all
these bandages on. Yeah. She also mentioned in her book
that she Emboris Karlof didn't like to go to the
commissary during meal breaks because they didn't like being stared
at because they both looked so completely bizarre in their
costumes that Karloff, who didn't like to miss meals, apparently
(14:17):
would wear like a cheese cloth veil and go down
to the commissary and like lift the veil to pop
food in. That seems weirder than showing up in your makeup. Yeah,
but when you think about what that makeup looked like,
and it was in the nineteen thirties when backlots were
probably more filled with people trying to look pretty and cute, Uh,
you could see her, it would be weird. But the
(14:38):
shroud does, Like having a shroudy cheese cloth of ale
while you eat your meals does seem odd as well.
I don't know. I think there's no winning in that
point in the shot where the bandages come off from
her eyes and they pop open as she looks around.
She wasn't supposed to blink, so she'd have to open
her eyes as wide as she possibly could and and
(15:00):
keep them open, which really caused her a lot of
pain as the day war on. Yeah, each day of shooting.
By the end of it, she was really in a
lot of pain. Uh. And then all the screaming that
she did throughout uh, because it's pretty much what she
does as the bride really took such a toll on
her throat that she was left unable to speak for
(15:20):
several days after the shoot, and she was even prescribed
coding for the pain because it had really ravaged her
throat quite badly. So all of these tribulations aside as
often happens with really grueling movie set stories. She spoke
very fondly ever time on the set with Wale, and
for those two weeks of filming, she became just a
really indelible part of the cinema's history. Yeah. And as
(15:45):
an aside, I love when people first see Brida Frankenstein
and they have that charming revelation that it's actually somewhat
of a comedy. I don't know if you've ever sat
through it in a theater, but you have these moments.
There's a few characters, particularly at the beginning, that are
played very broadly and kind of for laughs, and it's
fun to kind of look around and watch people go
(16:06):
I thought I was seeing a classic horror film kind
and they're like, but it's funny, the horror comedy. There's
there's funny in it. I really love that film. It's
so beautiful and so fun to watch, and I love
the the play of contrasts. It's just gorgeous. But rather
(16:27):
than wax rapsodic about how much I love the bride
at Frankenstein, shall we get back to Elsa now? Of course?
So she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars twice
in her career. The first was in ninety nine for
her role Income to the Stable, and then again in
seven for Witness for the Prosecution, which was her last
picture with her husband. Yeah, she and Charles Lawton did
(16:50):
a lot of projects together. She tried to keep her
career separate from his, but there were times when it
would work out or they wanted to be together. Uh,
you know, because they really did are very deeply about
each other. Even though they had had this revelation early
on in their marriage that he was gay, they still
really seemed to build this life together and were very
(17:10):
devoted to one another, so sometimes they would try to
work on the same projects, and throughout this time, Elsa
would continue to sing and dance in cabaret style shows.
She really never lost her love of performing live theater,
and she would sometimes two are in tandem with Charles.
He did a couple of book tours, and she would
try to set up cabaret tours that would follow the
same path as him. They became American citizens in nineteen fifty,
(17:34):
after having gotten lots of criticism back home for staying
in the United States during World War Two. According to Elsa,
Charles would often tell her, I was in the First
World War in the trenches bayonetting men and getting gassed.
I think once in a life is enough. Yeah, I
could see not wanting to do that again. The parents
(17:55):
stayed married, As I said, they were really quite devoted
to each other until Charles died into member of nineteen
sixty two, and he had had a really prolonged battle
with cancer. His lengthy treatments had really eaten a way
at the couple's finances, so when he died it wasn't
like she was left with a lot of money. She
had a small allowance that they had arranged after a
(18:16):
lot of legal sorting of his assets. Uh and there
was a pretty significant art collection that had to be
dealt with. But she needed to fiscally or support her
ailing mother who was back in London, and she needed
to supplement her income, so she started working in television series.
Uh and at that point, the one that she was
working on was The John Prescith Show. And she would
(18:39):
send funds to her mother Biddy regularly, and she really
often had throughout her life. Sadly, one of her cousins
thought that she had just abandoned her mother for Hollywood
and just wrote scathing letters accusing her of negligence. Yeah,
she uh prints she reprints those letters in her autobiography
and they really are just super mean, really accusing her
(19:00):
of basically being of extremely shallow and low character and
that she's just been, you know, completely entranced by Hollywood,
and and that clearly all she cares about is being
famous and important and she doesn't have any regard for family,
and that it's basically like, you're a horrible person. You're
so horrible and shallow, I hate you. And she just
keeps getting these letters. They're awful, but eventually, four years
(19:24):
after Charles died, Biddy also passed away. Uh. And it's
interesting because she did financially support her mother a great deal,
but also it was quite clear in all of her
writings that she never really liked her mother, though she
kept trying to, and she's, you know, pretty self reflective
about it. And it's like, I recognize that many people
say were a lot of light and that may be
(19:45):
a significant part of why we never really had a
meeting in the minds. Uh and her father had actually
died in the nineteen forties, but they weren't terribly close
and it wasn't something she really dwelled upon. Um. I
don't think she mentions it in her book until after
Biddy dies, where she's like, oh, yeah, Shamus had already
died like twenty years before that, and it's pretty glossy.
So even though she had this ongoing relationship with her
(20:08):
parents in a very interesting childhood and early adulthood where
she was still with them, she does seem to have
had some emotional separation from them, like she never she
didn't maintain a closeness with her family. Her career continued
through the eighties and primarily involved appearances on TV, and
a lot of roles in Disney films. She played Katie
(20:31):
Nanna in the opening scenes of Mary Poppins Yeah, which
a lot of people don't recognize her. She's much older
at that point, and she is for anyone who has
only vague recollection of that film, she is the nanny
at the very beginning who loses the children and because
the children ran away from her in the park and
she's quitting her job the big Suffragette song number at
the beginning. So that was really like the latter part
(20:55):
of her career. That was those last two decades where
spent mostly doing small parts on television, UM and in
these Disney films. UH. But then as she was getting older,
of course, she suffered two strokes in and UH. In
nineteen eighty six she contracted bronchial pneumonia and she died
at the end of that year, on December six, when
(21:16):
she was eighty four. At the time, she wrote of
her life, it was felicitous to be born in nineteen
o two. Anyone born around that time he had a
jackpot era. That is, if they lived through the two wars, science,
medicine and the arts. In this century tumbled over each
other at such speed that our human span of three
score years and ten seems more like living two hundred years. Yeah,
(21:41):
she was pretty, uh, kind of turned on by the
development of of culture and science and how quickly she
was watching technology develop and industry change. Uh. When it
came to talking about the Bride later in her life,
Lanchester once wrote that the quickest way to make her
shut up was to ask her about the Bride of Frankenstein,
(22:01):
because she was a very talkative and loquacious woman. And
in her books she says to this day, nine out
of ten photographs I get in the mail for autographing
or of the bride, I'm grateful for the Bride of Frankenstein.
It became a sort of trademark for me. But such
trademarks can cause typecasting and boomerang for some actors. Such
actors work all the time, some like it, some grumble.
(22:25):
Perhaps even more grateful for her turn in Frankenstein's sequel
are fans of horror and classic cinema. There's this just
instantly recognizable image of the bride, and that has been
all over all kinds of memorabilia. It's been made into dolls.
This year. It's part of a marketing campaign for for
Matt Cosmetics based around a line of products develops with
(22:47):
developed with effects artists Rick Baker, And like that clip
of her screaming, it's just everywhere it is. It's it
shows up in all kinds of pop culture references. It's
been mimt eyes, It'll show up in your Facebook feed periodically.
It really is quite a h an iconic to the
(23:09):
point that people who have never ever seen that movie,
and a lot of people haven't because it is quite
old and you don't always get to screenings, but it's, uh,
everybody knows that it's the Bride of Frankenstein without I
can't think of anybody who's ever seen it and gone,
what's that? Um, it's just instantly knowable. Uh. I remember
wanting to dress as her for Halloween one time when
(23:32):
I was a child, and I can't remember if I
actually got to do it or not. Like I remember
my mom being like that hair is the hair is
always what holds people back because I I've always had
extremely fine hair. I was like, that is not ever
going to take on your head well in wigs or
even tricky, you know. I don't know if the legs
don't always work right. I don't know if they had
(23:54):
Brad Frankenstein wigs for seven years the early eighties. I
guess that was early he might. Uh. There is also
a fan driven effort underway at the moment to get
the Motion Picture and Television Fund, which is the MPTF
to reprint else's autobiography. Um, if you're interested in investigating
(24:14):
that cause or adding your voice to it, you can
google reprint Elsa and you'll get to all the pertinent
sites and information. That effort is also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash reprint Elsa. And for me, it
was one of those things that when I found out
that people were trying to get reprinted, I was in
in a minute because she really is uh so fun
to read, even though and she knew so many interesting
(24:36):
people throughout her life, and she recalls with a great
deal of clarity some of these really fascinating interactions. Uh,
it's just a fun read even if you weren't interested
in Elsa Lanchester. I think her wit uh makes the
story of her life very fun and kind of enjoyable. Uh.
It is dense, though it's a lot of Uh, it's
(24:58):
a lot of book. I mean, it's not like a
fluffy read. There's a lot of interesting information there. Do
you have some listener mail for ends? I do, indeed,
and uh I did not check with this listener on pronunciation.
I don't know if his name is Josiah or Josiah,
because I know people that have done in both ways.
And he says, first off, let me say I love
the show. I had a decent amount of physics in college,
(25:19):
and I thought I may be able to shed some
light on the Vixen radar system and how it worked.
He's referring to the Louis Alpharez podcast. The basic principle
is that, in general, the closer you are to a
radio wave transmission, the stronger the signal you will receive.
So as an airplane approached a U boat, each successive
transmission of radio waves a ping, if you will, would
be stronger. Alvarez and company brilliantly designed a system that,
(25:42):
after initially detecting a submarine, would reduce the power of
each successive ping by a certain ratio, so while the
plane was actually getting closer and closer, the strength of
the radar transmission would actually get weaker, making it appear
as though it's going away from the target boat that
my athematical complications arise from the fact that the intensity
of a wave is inversely proportional to the square of
(26:05):
its radius. I did not fact check that of just
trusting you um in a simple example, ignoring some of
the more complicated behavior of waves. If you have the
distance between yourself and the target, reducing your radio power
to one quarter of its original strength will make you
appear stationary. The signal reaching the target will be the
same strength, even though you are much closer. Taking this
(26:28):
a step further, have the distance and reduce ratio power
by an eighth, and you will in effect appear to
be twice as far away. A slightly better explanation, he says,
would involve a whiteboard. But maybe this will help a little. Uh,
it doesn't make sense mathematically well. And I was hampered
a little bit and doing some of the research for
that episode because a lot of what I was reading
(26:48):
was definitely written for other physicist And when I started
trying to look up how to better explain multiple things
in the episode, there were there were some things that
I was able to come up with, like a lay
person's explanation for pretty quickly, and then others where I
just kept finding densely tynical explanations that were beyond my
(27:11):
ability to understand. So I am super happy that we
got a listener's thoughts on It was a really good
way to explain it, because I did not have time
to read an entire manual on Radar long. And I know, uh,
I and probably many other people, I really love science,
but I do get kind of watted up in a
little confused sometimes by the mathematics involved, and uh, some
(27:35):
of the more esoteric concepts I have to really kind
of fight my way in to get a handle on them.
So it's nice when it's laid out so nicely in uh,
normal people speak. So if you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcasts at
Discovery dot com, or you can visit us on Facebook
dot com slash history class stuff. We're on Twitter at
(27:56):
missed in History. You can also find us on Pinterest
in anyway all the things. If you would like to
learn more about what we've talked about today, you can
go to our website and type in for Frankenstein in
the search bar, and you will get a number of
different things, including how Frankenstein's Monster Works, and uh another
one called quiz called how well do you know Frankenstein's Monster?
(28:19):
It was very, very fun. How Frankenstein's Monster Works was
written by Robert Lamb who's on Stuff to bow your Mind,
and it's a really cool examination of literally how are
reanimated human that has been pieced together could scientifically work.
There's really fun stuff in it. I highly recommend it.
If you'd looks learn more about that or anything else
(28:40):
you can think of, you should do that at our website,
which is how Stuff Works dot com. But more on
this and thousands of other topics because it has to
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