There is a moment in the Hammer film The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) when someone describes Baron Frankenstein thus: ‘One moment you can be kind and charming, the next you can be as cold as the grave.’ For an audience who by the early 1970s would have been well versed in the nature of Frankenstein as a character, this is a somewhat thickheaded statement. Nevertheless, the association it makes between charismatic charm and outright villainy could also be used to characterise the short but lively horror career of Ralph Bates, the actor playing Frankenstein here, who would offer entertaining performances in half a dozen other British horror films and, despite some of the terrible things his characters got up to, emerged as an amiable genre presence. Despite this, Bates has never attracted the cult following associated with some other horror stars, possibly because his subsequent popularity on television has obscured his early association with horror, possibly because some of the horror films in which he featured were not very distinguished. This is a shame because his contribution to the British horror cycle is noteworthy, not just for its intrinsic value but also because of what it suggests about the nature of British horror production during the first half of the 1970s.
Bates was one of a number of young actors who came to brief prominence in British horror from the late 1960s onwards. Others included Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers in 1967, Witchfinder General in 1968), Shane Briant (Demons of the Mind in 1972, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell in 1974) and Ingrid Pitt (The Vampire Lovers in 1970, Countess Dracula in 1971, The House that Dripped Blood in 1971). Together they – along with a wave of young directors that included Michael Reeves, Peter Sasdy and Peter Sykes – contributed to a re-energising of the genre at a time when the horror conventions established principally by Hammer in the late 1950s were looking decidedly tired.
In the case of Bates, it was probably his eye-catching turn as evil Roman emperor Caligula in the television series The Caesars (1968) that earned him his big break in horror cinema. Bates’s screen debut, Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), was one of Hammer’s first attempts to refocus its horror formula in the light of an increasing emphasis on youth evident in the wider culture, and Bates was key to this thematic change. Indeed, his impressive first appearance crystallised the film’s impatience with the middle-aged authority figures that had been so important in earlier Hammer horrors. Three ostensibly respectable ‘gentlemen’ are paying their monthly visit to a brothel. As played by Geoffrey Keen, John Carson and Peter Sallis, they are an unprepossessing bunch, whose hypocrisy has by this stage thoroughly alienated us from them. Enter Lord Courtley who, in the form of Ralph Bates, is not just darkly handsome and self-assured but also possesses a perverse integrity – he knows he is bad and does not try to disguise it – entirely lacking in the wretched men whose orgy he interrupts.
present in this revisionary film, Courtley’s body is before our eyes transformed into Christopher Lee’s vampiric body, and Dracula lives again. In essence, this is a degeneration rather than a regeneration inasmuch as it shows the old replacing the new, and while Lee provides a gravitas lacking in the then relatively unknown Bates, his stately performance itself lacks the nuance and energy associated with Bates (with this no doubt reflecting Lee’s increasing disinterest in the role of Dracula). While the remainder of Taste the Blood of Dracula is an intelligent treatment of its subject – it is easily the best of Hammer’s later Dracula films – Bates’s engaging presence is sorely missed.
Underlining the way in which Hammer seemed to be positioning Bates as a young replacement for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, his next role for the company was as Frankenstein in the afore-
enthusiasm, arrogance, ruthlessness and vulnerability; he was also much more sexualised than Cushing had been in the role. By contrast, Bates was made to look older than his actual age in the lesbian vampire film Lust for a Vampire, a lacklustre sequel to The Vampire Lovers. In a role that was originally intended for Cushing, Bates turned out to be one of the film’s few highlights, capturing perfectly the grotesquery of his schoolteacher character as he shifted from pompous pedantry to a willing masochistic surrender to the vampire. Fear in the Night, in which Bates finally appeared alongside Cushing rather than just replacing him, was the last in Hammer’s series of psychological thrillers and offered less opportunities for the sort of melodramatic transformations found in the gothic horrors and at which Bates had proved so adept. Instead he was cast as an apparently dutiful husband who was eventually revealed to be a villain. Although the most restrained of all his Hammer roles, his portrayal of an ostensibly ordinary, domesticated male did, in retrospect at least, point the way to his later successful television career, which was founded in part on such domestic, if more benign, roles.
Much better as a film was Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1972), a transsexual-themed treatment of the Jekyll and Hyde story in which the doctor was transformed into a woman (with Sister Hyde played by Martine Beswick) that also threw Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper into the mix for good measure. The excitability of such a narrative could have lead to a farcical tone, particularly in the scenes in which Bates
psychological thriller in which Bates, back in mundane domestic mode, was the downtrodden son of the domineering Lana Turner who eventually turns on her and, in an unforgettably embarrassing scene, drowns her in a bowl of milk. I Don’t Want To Be Born (1975) reunited Bates with Peter Sasdy, who had earlier directed the impressive Taste the Blood of Dracula. Sadly this possession thriller was a laboured attempt to cash in on the success of The Exorcist (1973) and for once Bates seemed ill at ease. That was the end of Bates as horror star, although he went on to find television fame as another villain, George Warleggan, in the popular historical melodrama series Poldark (1975-1977) and subsequently in the very different role of the cuckolded hero in the sitcom Dear John (1986-1987). In both cases, as he had done with his horror roles, he managed to make ostensibly unsympathetic or pathetic figures unexpectedly likeable.
Perhaps unavoidably, Bates’s death at the age of 50 from pancreatic cancer has bestowed a retrospective poignancy on these early performances in his career. When watching them now, one can’t help thinking that he would have been affable company among the dwindling band of Hammer artists as they reminisce in interviews or on DVD commentaries about the making of these films. However, the value of Bates’s short-lived horror stardom is more tangible than this, for his horror performances offered a high level of unpretentious but thoroughly professional accomplishment, with a commitment and attention to detail often fashioned in unpromising circumstances. To a large extent, Bates’s virtues as an actor are also the virtues of Hammer horror at its best, eschewing the abstract and the extravagant in favour of something more considered and more solid.
After his death, Ralph Bates’s wife, the actor Virginia Wetherell (herself a regular in British horror, including Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, where she played one of her then future husband’s victims) set up the Ralph Bates Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, details about which can be found at http://www.ralphbatespcr.org.uk/app/.
halcyon days of the early 30s, by the mid-40s and the end of Wartime hostilities, monster movies had lost much of their potential to shock or excite. Increasingly associated with juvenile delinquency and psycho-sexual problems, the monster would once again raise its ugly head in a slew of 1950s teenage drive- in horror movies. At the same time, more mature audiences were invited to consider the threat their beautiful homes and good jobs faced from a surprise attack of atomically mutated giant ants or brainy invaders from Mars.
With the demise of the more traditional monster Ankers' career in Hollywood was soon over. In 1942 she married B-movie hunk, Richard Denning (Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955), Creature with the Atom Brain (1954)). By 1945 her time with Universal Studios had ended, and after freelancing in the odd mystery and adventure movie (most notably, Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949), the first Tarzan film to feature Lex Barker in the title role) she went into semi-retirement in 1950 to raise her daughter, with occasional appearances on TV. Ankers and Denning moved to Hawaii in the 1960s. There, Denning was offered the role of Governor Paul Jameson on the television series Hawaii Five-O, remaining with the series for its entire 12 year run. Sadly, Ankers died of ovarian cancer in 1985 at the age of 67. As one of the last, and certainly one of the most talented heroines of the Classic horror movie era, Evelyn Ankers truly deserves to be remembered. May her blood-curdling scream ring on in the ears of horror fans for many years to come.
So wrote H. P. Lovecraft to his young correspondent Fritz Leiber on 19 December 1936, somewhat less than three months before his own death. Lovecraft had sought to educate his new friend in the classics of the various imaginative genres, from M. R. James through Lord Dunsany all the way to Olaf Stapledon. Like Lovecraft, Leiber (1910-1992) would base his writing on this study and use the knowledge to unite British and American methods in developing – what exactly? Quite a few of his tales seem to occupy a territory that is purely his, not least in its combination of the macabre and the erotic.
He was one of the most honoured writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror – fields in which he was equally adept, not a common achievement. It has been argued that the solitariness and austerity of his later years, when he occupied a single room with so little space that he had to sit on his bed to write with a typewriter on his lap, simply demonstrated that he preferred to spend his income on travel. Nevertheless the feeling persists that he seldom received the appreciation he deserved, and I suggest that his contribution to horror fiction has yet to be fully celebrated.
elsewhere he revives the reticence of M. R. James in a contemporary fashion, while “Diary in the Snow” suggests Blackwood’s “The Willows” reimagined in more explicitly science-fictional terms. In Leiber’s fiction, as in Lovecraft’s, science and horror often overlap; indeed, his earliest (posthumously) published tale, The Dreams of Daniel Kesserich, achieves this synthesis.
Some of his tales invent modern archetypes: “The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity” lends sentience to that power, while “The Black Gondolier” floods a dream version of the American Venice with oil and creates a new Charon out of the medium. “Gonna Roll the Bones” goes further in a sense, sketching a future where space flight is mundane but is still manipulated by magic and haunted by the oldest personified fear. Leiber was never above reinventing the traditional, and frequently acknowledged the roots of his work. Eventually, having at Lovecraft’s suggestion excised references to that author’s mythos from his early tale “Adept’s Gambit”, he even wrote an explicitly Lovecraftian story, “The Terror from the Depths”, which revisits his theme of inspiration and the unwanted powers it may invoke.
own convey the indescribably alien – has its origin in “The Willows”. In terms it’s worthy of Blackwood at his finest. Like Lovecraft, Leiber learned from the best in the field, which he then developed and enriched. He is the father of the urban tale of supernatural terror, and one of the last century’s great masters of the weird.
No screen actress has been pestered and pawed by a more impressive cast of monsters and ghouls than 1940s Scream Queen extraordinaire, Evelyn Ankers. The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Invisible Man, The Mad Ghoul, The Ape Woman and The Creeper have all at some point made Ankers the object of their pitiable lusts and infantile aggressions. Fay Wray may have been mauled by the biggest of the silver screen’s brutes but Ankers was harassed by the most varied assortment. Born in Chile, to British parents in 1918, she moved to England in the 1920s and by the mid 1930s began appearing in small parts in British films. Like many actors of the time, Ankers relocated to the U.S. where she found a career in Hollywood. Her association with horror films began when she co-starred with Abbot and Costello in the comedy Hold That Ghost (1941), which also featured Joan Davis as a professional radio screamer, and a musical number by The Andrews Sisters!
The exact lineage of the Scream Queen is not that easy to trace. In many ways, the busty heroines of the 1960s cult horror movies were the first, at least the first to be given the title of Scream Queen. It seems that this term was then retrospectively applied to all those horror actresses of earlier times who greeted each crisis with an ear splitting shriek. Perhaps Gary J. Svehla of Midnight Marquee Press says it best in his introduction to Hollywood’s Classic Scream Queens 1930s (2000):
Undoubtedly, Fay Wray is the most famous of these, her lung power being tested to the full alongside her mute co-star Kong. She headed an illustrious line of high voltage horror heroines such as Mae Clarke (Frankenstein, 1931), Gloria Stuart (The Old Dark House, 1932), Valerie Hobson(The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935), and Frances Drake (Mad Love, 1935).
Even if the male icons were the legends in the making – Karloff, Lugosi, etc. – the women, less identifiable, less recognizable, became the impetus for the horror and its resolution; the actresses who helped make the male performances so classically memorable. For far too long the women remained in the shadows, posing in provocative shots with their more easily identifiable male counterparts.
By the 1940s however, there came a decided shift in the Screen Queen formula. Replacing the usually frail, passive and somewhat aristocratic horror heroines of the 1930s, the horror films of the 1940s presented a new leading lady, intelligent, quick witted and more often than not, working class. Enter Ms. Ankers. Of the twenty seven or so features she made with Universal eleven would have distinct horror elements. Along with her four co-starring roles with Lon Chaney Jr. cited above, these included Captive Wild Woman (1943), in which mad scientist, John Carradine, injects an orang-utan with a dying woman’s blood, turning it into a beautiful she-creature (Acquanetta)that turns back into her murderous
ape state when her jealously is aroused. The Mad Ghoul (1943), mad scientist George Zucco, exposes apes and then his assistant to an ancient nerve gas, resulting in the latter’s transformation into a ghoul who must have human hearts to live. Jungle Woman (1944), Ankers, once again, finds herself the object of a murderous ape woman’s jealousy. The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), where (you guessed it) mad scientist, John Carradine, tests his invisibility formula on an escaped convict with calamitous results, involving murderous revenge, an invisible parrot named Methuselah, and an invisible dog, who answers (presumably) to the name of Brutus!
Among the most notable of non-horror ventures Ankers starred in during her time at Universal were two films in the Sherlock Holmes series, staring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, The Voice of Terror (1942) and The Pearl of Death (1944). The latter is based on the Arthur Conan Doyle story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons and one of the best in the Rathbone/Bruce series. In it, Ankers plays Naomi Drake, a charming and brilliant criminal, adept at bravura disguises, who, working in cahoots with Giles Conover (Miles Mander), attempts to steal a priceless and ill-omened pearl. Yet, even in this film, Ankers’ monster magnetism is at work, as she finds herself the unwilling recipient of the adoration of Conover’s hulking henchman, The Creeper, played by none other than Rondo Hatton; who, when he’s not snapping people's spines at Conover’s command, can be found prowling around her room “making wistful little noises like a dog” and stroking her make-up compact. A prime candidate for a future piece in this section, Rondo Hatton subsisted on uncredited bit roles as a thug/monster assigned to him primarily, if not wholly, based on his disfigured appearance which was caused by acromegaly, a hormonal disorder resulting in an excessive growth of the brow, lower jaw and hands and feet. Hatton's role as The Creeper in The Pearl of Death would change
Later that year Ankers starred alongside Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man, a film that would define her as the 1940s' leading horror heroine. In this sadly underrated Universal monster movie, which also features Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya, Ankers’ intelligent and sensitive heroine is perfectly suited to Chaney’s somewhat bumbling yet gregarious character, Larry Talbot, and his pitiful alter ego, The Wolf Man. A nice everyday girl working in her father’s antique and bric-a-brac shop in a small Welsh village, Gwen Conliffe (Ankers) sells Larry an ornate walking stick. Correcting Larry’s mistaken identification of the figure on the stick’s sliver handle as a dog, she explains that it is actually a wolf’s head. Pointing out the sign
of the pentagram engraved on the stick, she then tells Larry about the folkloric tale of the werewolf. Thoroughly modern and level-headed, Gwen is surprisingly knowledgeable about such matters and can even recite an old proverb about the werewolf :
“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may
become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the Autumn moon is bright.”
The unfortunate Larry will experience all this firsthand when he is bitten by a wolf (gypsy fortune-teller, Bela Lugosi) which he clubs to death with the silver handle of his walking stick while trying to save a woman from its savage attack. But of course, like so many ill-fated heroes when first informed of such things as the werewolf myth Larry simply laughs, his only concern being to get a date with Gwen. “What big blue eyes you have…” is his reply. Ankers and Chaney would appear together again in numerous Universal horror movies, including The Ghost of Frankenstein (1943), Son of Dracula (1943), The Frozen Ghost (1945), and Weird Woman (1944), part of Universal’s Inner Sanctum film series.
this however, as Universal capitalized on his looks (no make-up department budget required) with a series of films in which he reprised his Creeper role, House of Horrors (1946) and The Brute Man (1946). Sadly, as a result of his acromegaly, Hatton died of a heart attack soon after making these films. Curiously, Hatton did feature in The Jungle Captive (1945) as Moloch the disfigured assistant of mad scientist, Otto Kurger. This was the third in Universal's Ape Woman series, the first two installments, as mentioned above, featuring Ankers. This third venture did not feature Ankers, however, and for once, she was spared the advances of a hulking admirer.
Ankers' monster magnetism makes her a classic Scream Queen without the epistemological confusion which surrounds certain other horror actresses such as Gloria Holden (Dracula's Daughter, 1936) and Simone Simon (Cat People, 1942), who are called Scream Queens but are actually the baddies, and more likely to elicit a scream than emit one. Clearly a cover-all term for women in horror films, Scream Queens may be goodies or baddies but they are rarely both. An interesting exception is Elsa Lanchester, who, in The Bride of Frankenstein (1932), blurs these boundaries by playing both Mary Shelley and the female creature. Indeed, even as the creature Lanchester is both monster and damsel in distress, hissing like a snake but also emitting a terrified scream when she sees her intended mate.
This confusion between the monsters and the maidens of horror continues in present day incarnations of the Scream Queen and is particularly evident in the dubious development of a sort of goth-girl soft porn which adopts the term to describe its dark babes. With the advent of the slasher/stalker films of the 1980s Scream Queen lists have grown considerably, from Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau, to more recent entries such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Biel, Lindy Booth, and Katharine Isabelle. Using the term coined by Carol J. Clover, in her seminal work on gender and modern horror cinema, Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992), these actresses are also "final girls"; the last person (inevitably female) left alive to confront the slasher/killer. Usually, young, androgynous, good girls (ie. non-smoking/non-drug taking virgins), these final girls tend to avoid the grisly end meted out to their less clean-living friends, facing-off with the killer, and appropriating his methods and weaponry to finally defeat him (at least until the sequel that is). This confrontation usually involves the masculinzation of the already androgynous final girl through her appropriation of phallic weapons (knives, chainsaws etc). As Clover argues, this process involves an unstable and fluid gender identification between the female protagonist and horror audience (usually posited as male).
Like the final girl of modern horror, Scream Queens of the past also survive their attackers but their methods of survival are quite different. While some peripheral squared jawed hero, usually named Paul, may engage in fisticuffs with the monster, in truth, the heroine's survival is more often than not brought about by her relationship with said monster. Her empathy or simply lack of aggressive behaviour towards the creature is often enough to ensure that she, at least, will not be harmed. Rather than appropriating the violent methods of her male counterparts, horror heroines such as Ankers, older than final girls and infinitely wiser than their own male counterparts, are perhaps best described as "final women." Not only final women in their tendency to survive the attentions of a brutal monster, actresses like Ankers were final women of an era of horror films. Already fading considerably since the
Welcome to our Lost Souls page, which is dedicated to resurrecting the neglected & underrated personages of Horror. We present here an exciting group of short essays by some of today's Horror writers and critics, who offer a reappraisal of their favourite writers, actors and directors. Unashamedly eclectic, the subjects of these essays ranges from sixth century bishop, Gregory of Tours, to the 1940s movie Gorilla Man, Charles Gemora.
“Nor will science ever be able to kill the feelings of wonder in the human spirit. The mystery of the black outer gulfs, and of the deepest cognitive processes within us, must always remain unplumbed – and against these imagination must always frantically pound…”
His first full-length novel, Conjure Wife – expanded from its original appearance in Unknown Worlds – explores their opposition. A college professor and champion of rationalism discovers that his wife is practising witchcraft to help his career. He insists she stop, only to learn that her spells protected him from the powers of other campus wives. This can be read as fantastic satire of the kind that John W. Campbell encouraged contributors to Unknown Worlds to deliver, but Leiber reaches beyond it to genuine terror. His view of women as mysterious and magical informs stories throughout his career, from “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” – a highly contemporary late forties variant on vampirism, in which the psychically voracious title character is a celebrated fashion model who feeds on male desire – through “A Deskful of Girls” a decade later, where a crazed psychiatrist keeps spectral essences of his female patients filed in his office until they take revenge, all the way to the late “Horrible Imaginings”, which introduces a ghostly female harbinger of death.
“It is the American metropolis, jammed with iron and stone, that sets off my sense of the horrible and beautiful… Things like the buzz of a defective neon sign, the black framework of the elevated, muttering of machinery one cannot identify – there are terrors in the modern city, in comparison to which the darks of Gothic castles and haunted woods are light.” In writing this Fritz had his first collection, Night’s Black Agents, in mind. It’s a statement of his radical approach to the genre – decades later, in his introduction to Kirby McCauley’s Frights, he was to champion “something new, something utterly startling, something undreamed of” as the essence of the tale of terror – but equally important is its insistence on beauty as part of the horror. His Frights piece, paraphrasing Horatio, is entitled “Wonder and Terror”. Like all the greatest writers in the field, he strives for awe.
Radicalism combined with his knowledge of the field to produce one of his earliest and most important tales, “Smoke Ghost”. Instead of being invaded by the supernatural, the mundane setting – forties Chicago – is now its source, and the grubby half-glimpsed spectre its genius loci. Here and
The grand summary of his themes, though, is the intensely autobiographical novel Our Lady of Darkness (which at several points points makes clear its debt to M. R. James, however much that author would have disapproved of its perverse eroticism). Franz Westen, the protagonist, is – like the author – an ex-alcoholic widower who lives in the same San Francisco building as Leiber (but in a similar apartment immediately above his). Having acquired almost the only surviving copy of a book about the psychic essences of modern cities and their occult manipulation, he becomes haunted by a presence that may be composed of his yearning for his lost wife, his pulpish inspiration as a writer and the dark spirit of the city. It is finally overcome by the spell of his young female neighbour, who invokes the order of music, philosophy and science.
One last tale for this essential but by no means exhaustive list: “A Bit of the Dark World”, in which Leiber set himself the task of discovering whether cosmic terror could be achieved in a contemporary (seventies) setting. Once again his method – using a succession of images as a single metaphor to its
SUSAN CABOT
by Tom Weaver
Susan Cabot (1927-1986) began her screen career as an extra in the 1947 drama Kiss of Death, in which she's only seen from the back (as a diner at a restaurant) but is instantly recognizable by her then-waist-length hair. Her exotic look made her a good choice for the role of an island girl in the low-budget On the Isle of Samoa (1950); at Universal in the early 1950s, she specialized in these types of parts (Middle Eastern gals in Flame of Araby and Son of Ali Baba, American Indians in Tomahawk and The Battle of Apache Pass, etc.). But it was away from the major studios, working with producer-director Roger Corman, that she made the movies that elevated her to cult status: the rock'n'roller Carnival Rock, the crime drama Machine-Gun Kelly, the surreal Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, the sci-fi War of the Satellites and, most notoriously, the title role in The Wasp Woman.
thing to a "lead" that I had. So I was bowled over when, on that first California trip, Lori Revenge of the Creature Nelson mentioned casually that she'd seen Susan just the other day, at some sort of reunion of Universal Pictures veterans. She gave me the phone number of Jim Pratt, who ran the studio in the '50s (and had, I believe, arranged the reunion), and he was able to put me in touch with Susan.
To make a long story short, my brother Jon and I were soon very friendly with Susan, the fun of knowing her only slightly spoiled by her aggressively oddball son Tim. The kid was pleasant but...strange. He struck me as looking like about 12 years old (facially and height-wise) but he was obviously much older, because he had his own car. Too often he did "little things" that would drive his mom nuts, like wearing
Susan's house was...ALSO strange. A mini-mansion, walled and gated, including a kennel full of vicious-sounding dogs--a lot fancier than you'd think a single mom whose long-ago credits were mostly on the War of the Satellites level could afford. There were rumours that, Back in the Day, she and King Hussein were an item; when I'd bring that up, SHE was the one who did the clamming-up. Eventually I began to think that was where the money was apparently still coming from.
Inside, it got weirder. The place was a wreck and apparently always had been. There was junk piled everywhere, to the point that finding a place where three or four people could sit down was a major project involving lots of moving-of-stacks-of-junk. The dust was piled almost as high as the junk; I still remember
Cabot's murder. And I also found out what it was about her death that had made it unusual and newsworthy thousands of miles from Hollywood: It sounded like Timothy was a suspect.
It turns out he DID do it, in "self-defense," of course he'd had to "defend himself" against tiny Susan by bashing her to death with a weight-lifting bar. His earliest story involved a home invasion by Ninjas (have
The kid was whiter than a glass of milk!) Anyway, enough hot air was spewed that this characteristically Californian court slapped Tim on the wrist with a three-year suspended sentence. In other words, he got away with it.
It's been so many years since I met and got to know Susan Cabot, almost half-my-lifetime ago, and there was so much that was unusual (to say the least) about the experience, that it all sorta feels a bit like a dream now.
It was on my first-ever trip to California, around 1984, that I first met Susan, who had been at or near the top of my find-and-interview list almost since Day One of my pursuing that hobby. I not only thought she was a knockout looks-wise in movies like The Wasp Woman, Machine-Gun Kelly and others, but acting-wise too, and it frustrated me that no one knew where she'd ended up. Roger Corman told me, wrongly, that she was living happily in Washington D.C.; that bum steer was the closest
sunglasses when we'd go out at night (and clamming-up and ignoring her requests to take them off), refusing to watch some of her movies with us even though she was practically begging him to, etc. Things that seemed to me to be designed to get her worked up. A Swift Kick In The Ass (a SKITA, as I call them) would
