SOURCE: CRAWDADDY Magazine, June 1978 by Senior editor Timothy White [edited out one long section about history of Vlad Tepes] Seems like everywhere one turns nowadays, the fabled old vampire count is within biting distance. Across the nation, he's the subject of, or inspiration for, a glut of best selling books, sold-out stage productions, and feature films, with many more on the way. After a heinous six-century reign, how does the undead Dracula, Master of the Night, king of warlocks, werewolves, rampaging bats, and bloodthirsty cadavers, manage such staying power? Frank Langella, the magnetic, princely leading man who incarnates the current craze in the Broadway smash, Dracula, has logged a lot of pensive hours in his counterpart's coffin, and he thinks he's finally divined the cryptic truth. "I don't think there's anybody who hasn't wanted to be Dracula," he contends. "By that I mean there isn't anybody who wouldn't like immortality, and wouldn't sign a contract quick if there could be a way to have it. Certainly everybody wants to be the best of their breed, the top, No. 1 -- and if you take Dracula at his own words, he is the king of his own kind. At the end of the play, when the men who have come to destroy him are holding him at bay, he says, 'You do not know how many men have come against me! In these veins flow the blood of a conquering race!' Dracula is a boyar, a nobleman, a glorious victor over Death. Emotionally he lives on a scale far greater than any other of the measly mortals around him. "I decided to play him as I felt he was: a lonely, troubled monarch with a sense of humor and a unique and distinctive social problem -- he is compelled to subsist on the blood of innocent victims. If he can get his daily dose and be back in his box by sunrise he's fine and can go on for centuries more, fearing only the stake. Who else lives like that? "I think a singularity of lifestyle can produce a certain type of grandeur, poise -- identity -- and Dracula's got it. All the legendary characters have these qualities; it's what maks them special, so that when they walk into a room everybody backs off. I'm not gonna make Dracula out to be a hero, but he can be a positive force in certain ways. He demonstrates, for instance, that if you set out to do something with integrity and strength of purpose, allowing nothing internal or external to get in your way, you can conquer anything, even the grave. "There's another reason," adds Langella, "why audiences love Dracula: He's sexy. Certainly it's obvious why he's appealing to women -- because it's nice to fantasize having a tall, dark stranger appear in your bedroom, pick you up flamboyantly and do it to you in a whole new way. If you're a man, I think the nicest fantasy love session would combine the same strength, tenderness, and mutual fascination. "All of this takes style and that's something I've alweays seen in Dracula, occasionally in film but mostly as he was originally pictured in Bram Stoker's book. I never thought he was a guy with a mouth dripping blood all the time. If anything, I think he'd have found that abhorrent. It would be totally out of character for him to want blood spurting everywhere, with throats ripped open and all that messiness. He would have been neat, clean, gentlemanly about his bloodsucking; a nice, tight fuck -- if you'll pardon the expression -- of the neck is what he'd be after. Listen, this man is of royalty! He's got hundreds of years of majesty behind him!" * * * Thankfully, I have arranged to face Frank Langella in the warm light of day, entering his lair in the bowels of the Martin beck Theatre by traversing the now lifeless set of Dracula, an awesome, saturnine construction of illustrator/designer Edward Gorey's most dour, skeletal nasties. Embedded and camoflaged everywhere in the thin-lined maze of black, white and gray are batsbatsbats -- etched in the wallpaper, moulded between the bedposts and encrusted in the huge sarcophagus that lies empty opposite the two trap doors by which Frank/Dracula eludes his enemies. Langella's dressing room is guarded by a suspicious-looking wench who vanishes silently as I arrive. Predictably, Frank follows the Devil's dictum that He may only ensnare willing souls, and bids me to enter freely and of my own volition. I am no sooner across the threshhold than, with a flourish of azure terrycloth bathrobe, he orders me to sit across from him as he reclines regally on the couch. I watch as he finishes a glass of fruit juice, then places it on a crumb-strewn Sesame Street place mat emblazoned with the image of The Count, a Muppet doomed to the timeless task of teaching tots their numerals. Despite the gray eye shadow, pale pancake, and his imposing stature, I am at once taken by Langella's nonchalant demeanor and hearty, melodic laugh. But as I survey the magnitude of Dracula merchandise and mementoes crammed into his cozy haunt (plastic/plaster busts, dolls, danglements, puppets, paintings, pendants, a Dinner with Drac!1p) I am reminded of the many wily ways of the mightly vampire himself: He can not only transmogrify into a bat and werewolf, but also a mist or phosphorescent dust which can steal through the merest crack or cranny. Recommended defenses against his intrusions are garlands of garlic and criucifixes. A branch of wild rose will confine him to his casket, a blessed bullet fired into the occupied pall will undo him, but the surest procedure is the venerable stake through the heart, accompanied by a severing of the head. Fair enough, but how can one deter the burgeoning commercial multiplications of his unholy name? "Why fight it?" Langella chuckles. "What's the phrase? 'There are some things man was not meant to understand'? Look, just take the bare frame of the story, as if, for example, this was a brand new play and we had not grown up on Dracula stories. The show is about a thing called a vampire, an immortal man who sleeps in a box, wakes at dusk and roams the earth, having a fine time. He's a rugged individualist and people, young and old, respect him -- as I do -- for it! If you took a packet of my mail and read it, you'd see the audiences feel just that way." When Langella's oratory is interrupted by a phone call, I take his advice and pick up a note at random from the shrubbery of mailgrams and letters taped to the walls ("break a tooth!", "Bloody good luck!", "May your sucking bring happiness to millions. Love, Annie and Mel Brooks"). Set down on stationary decorated with pussycats and birds, in a child's deliberate scrawl, is the following: For my birthday I went to see Dracula. One of the spots I like was when you bit Lucy in the neck. I also liked when one of the guys stabed (sic0 you. Can you please write back and tell me how you could be alive when he stabed you. Also, how come you were so friendly in the beginning? Judith "I'm not certain what effect I have on children," Langella concedes. "For the most part, they seem to adore Dracula -- not me; ten years from now they won't remember the actor, just Dracula. "Now I think to myself, 'Am I doing something terrible to these children? Am I making evil pretty to them?' I really don't believe so. There's nothing wrong with them finding Dracula attractive and interesting, since he does get his just desserts in the end. When kids go home, asking their parents, 'Why did Dracula have to die?' they can say it was because he was a man who took blood and that's wrong, bad. Besides, in many ways, Dracula's death is a mercy killing. I always wanted to have him scream out, 'Yes! Do it, do it! Set me free!' " One of three children born to Frank and Angelina Langella, Frank Jr., 38, grew up in Bayonne and South Orange, NJ. His older brother, Andrew, works in his father's business, described as "refinishing oil drums for industrial use," but the younger Frank had other ideas. He landed his first role at 11 -- an 85-year-old man in an Abraham Lincoln pageant at School No. 3 in Bayonne. since then, he's had a creditable film and stage career, appearing in Mel Brooks' hilarious The Twelve Chairs, Rene Clement's Le Maison sur les Arbres [AKA The Deadly Trap AKA Death Scream, with Faye Dunaway], and Diary of a Mad Housewife, for which he won the National Society of Film Critics Award. He's captured several OBIE's for his off-Broadway activities and a Tony for his Braodway debut in Edward Albee's Seascape. The revival of the Deane-Balderston dramatization of Dracula, however, vaulted him to stardom. Looking back to when he was an 11-year-old, would he have been appalled by his character? "When I was a kid I had all kinds of crazy fears, dreams about people coming in the night to get me, tigers and ghosts, but no vampires. Mostly it was the Mummy; that film scared the living hell out of me. "I don't enjoy being scared anymore. I don't see any reason for putting myself in such an uncomfortable position, to plague my mind with all that stuff. But I don't believe in mysticism of any sort. I'm very pragmatic; I don't believe in spooky things. Dracula to me is glorious to perform, but not for a moment do I believe he does or could exist." Actually Langella's Dracula (a very loose variation on the book's) is exciting and fun but never fearsome. Claiming he can be dispassionate about him, we discuss the celebrated vampire's broad appeal. "I didn't research him heavily," Frank confesses in his smooth-spoken tone. "Whenever I'm playing a famous character who has either lived or been known widely, I find that researching him too heavily can stifle my imagination. I purposely didn't see any of the movies. I wanted to do something with him that would be, if not completely different, then unique. So I didn't steep myself in the book or how Lugosi or Christopher Lee did him. How do you feel onstage in the Dracula personna? "You very rarely get an opportunity to play someone who's totally omnipotent, and that's what he is," Langella says with pleasure. "There's an extraordinary f eeling about playing a character who is all-powerful. I can think about this now, but when I' onstage I never consider it. We're used to seeing Dracula taking himself terribly seriously and I try not to. God knows, when somebody comes at him with wolfbane, or when he wants to screw Lucy, that's serious. But the rest of the night I think he's having a rather cheerful time. It's everyone else who feels uneasy. "What I am constantly aware of is that I'm maneuvering, going after my needs, and my need there is Lucy. I have a great desire, passion, lust for her on all kinds of levels." Throughout the play, I observe, Dracula seems to tower over the rest of the characters. He has a grand purpose in life and deat, a resolve they only aspire to. "These are puny, tiny people as far as he's concerned," Langella nods with relish. "They are nothing; to be used and gotten out of the way -- except for Lucy." What's so special about Lucy? "He's in love with her," he exults. "That's the answer! She's his queen. 'The blood is the life' Dracula says, but here he's found something more important. Why did he fall for one being and not another? What draws him to the point if irresistability and carelessness? Love, of course -- what else?" Your Dracula is a true Gothic romance, I tell Langella. The bedroom scenes with Lucy are unexpectedly amorous, and I think I see a terrible ambivalence in her eyes. The idea of being ravished by the Count is not altogether unpleasant to her. "We had long talks in rehearsal about Lucy's complicity in the erotic love scene," he recounts. "She had to be at Count Dracula's mercy but not totally a victim. After all, you, me, everybody falls into evil so often that it's got to be pretty nice or we wouldn't be so prone to it. We're always doing things that aren't good for us, always eating, or smoking or screwing around too much, or whatever it is that everyone says is wrong; then repenting and feeling guilty, saying, 'I won't do that again ... for a while.' "The idea of evil as always being painted black, being hideous with horns -- that came from the Church and social guilt. It's especially apparent in the Victorian setting of the play. If somebody went out and did something wonderfully naughty at that time and openly enjoyed it, it was decried as awful. Guilt crept in and that's how things like sin were created, whatever that is." Louis Jourdan, outlining his performance in the chilling three-part Public Television production, Count dracula, says that he "tried to make him as attractive as possible. Like so many evil people, Dracula really believes he is doing good. He claims to give his victims eternal life." From Langella's perspective, what is the kindest thing Dracula does? "Well, it's not in the script as written, not in the dialogue, but I have always felt he had a great affinity for Professor Van Helsing, the man who ultimately destroys him. He realizes that Van Helsing is a man of bearing and lofty impulses, a fighter. When Van Helsing accidentally cuts his finger in the second act, Dracula could very easily swoop down then and there and kill him. Instead he warns him to 'Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think!' "In his battle of wits with the Professor, Dracula plays by the rules. He's not a vulgar man and yet he's portrayed with so much vulgarity. What happens very often with characters of greatness is that we worship them and then, when we can no longer stand our feelings of inferiority, we pull them down. Dracula is a king who revels in being a king, and he would rather die than reduce himself to the level most of us live on." Granted, Dracula may be exalted and principled, but surely he's capable of a measure of insensitivity. What's the unkindest thing Dracula does? "What an interesting question," says Langella, mulling it over. "Hmmmmmm; you know, I guess I'm so sympathetic towards him, I can't think of a single unkind thing he does. It's not very nice to break a mirror, as he does in Lucy's house, but I wouldn't call that unkind, just rude. I just ran through the entire script in my mind and he never does one mean thing -- he's got perfect manners." How about his treatment of mental patient, Renfield? Dracula brutalizes him in the third act. "No. That wasn't unkindness. He vowed to Renfield that if he did as his master said, he would have power and life through eternity. And, like the rest of us mortals, he lets Dracula down. I tell you, I'm speaking very much in the presence of my own character, since I'm wearing his makeup," Langella admits sheepishly. " But no, he wasn't unkind to Renfield. I think Renfield's been pretty shitty to Dracula, going off and telling people where he's hiding out! He's the Judas of my life, that Renfield. And I assure you, he'll get his tonight!" The phone rings for the umpteenth time. "Aw, there's no rest for the vampire," says Langella with a vexed grin. "They should know better than to call me before sundown." * * * [Edited out about 2 pages of extraneous material] * * * Funny thing about impersonating the Devil's son: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The weight of the world and the next is on Frank Langella's broad shoulders each time the curtain goes up at the Martin beck Theatre. Many observers perceive the perils posed by the new rage he represents as being odious is nature, far reaching in scope. A hint of the impending turpitude surfaces at a Wednesday matinee of Dracula. During the nomally steamy but restrained love scene, the deft Count falters in his scrupulous affections, inadvertently catching the strap of Lucy's clinging night gown pulling it downward to expose her sculptured left breast. There is no discernable outrage in the rapt house of senior citizens and small fry, just modest sniggering and communal shock. "That happens about twice a month," Langella reveals afterward. "It's entirely accidental. the scene is exciting because of its simplicity, timing, and purity, and I don't wish to embroider it. I think the fact that the breast was bared was too real -- and that ruins things for the audience. All that went through my mind was 'Damn it! I hope I'm not poisoning any sweet young minds.' " Suddenly Langella is summoned from his dressing room by his valet de chambre. "There must be 80 people at the stage door," she sighs, "and they all want autographs. Could you c'mon out?" A thunderous whoop goes up when Langella materializes in the entranceway. Squinting into the late afternoon light, he scribbles with abandon and the throng presses in. One wispy cherub with a blue flower in her hair emerges from the turmoil and and softly announces: "I like the way you handle your cape." She is no more than five. Frank/Drac gapes, then howls with glee. He is signing the little one's progam when a raven-tressed teenage nymph in snug jeans and fatigue jacket shoves her way to his side. There is an enigmatic fire in her hazel gaze, a dire urgency to her request. "Please," she entreats him, looking deep into his painted eyes, requesting his private ear. "I want to tell you something." Langella tenses. "No you don't," he says with taut finality, gently but firmly forcing her back with one hand. She lingers, hesitating, on the outskirts of the inner circle, staring anxiously, straining to regain his attention. He cooly ignores her, but she will not be daunted. A corridor opens up in the crowd and she hurries through it. "Please. I have to tell you ..." She catches Langella off-guard. His hands are not free to hold her at bay, and as she lunges forward he can feel her hot breath upon his neck ... "Your fly is open." * * *