Claude Rains - Madness, Magic, & Mayhem

By John Soister, Jessica Rains, JoAnna Jones and Donna Tattle

Although my grandfather had passed away before I was born, my mother's memories of him - and love for him - became part of my life.

Still, having grown up in the '70s and '80s, I was very much down on black and white films; as I grew older - and more tolerant - I slowly came to know and love his work. This book has been written with so much devotion and love to who he was, I hope with all of my heart that it brings you joy to know more about my grandfather, Claude Rains.

Cheers.
Abigail Lenz Allen

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Nov 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201107215

Book preview

PREFACE – Jessica Rains: My Life as a Daughter

Sometime in 1998, I got phone call from a fellow named John Soister who asked me if I would be kind enough to write the preface for a book he was working on about my father’s career. Sure! I said, why not? With pen to paper for the first time since college, I whipped up a memory of my father rather quickly and sent it off to him. Many years later, my friend John (yes, we became friends) called and asked if I would collaborate with him on another book about my father and his flirtation with madness in some of his work. Not that John suggested that my father was mad, mind you, but that a decent part of his body of work did have him playing men who were....out of sorts. His request caught me at a fairly quiet time in my life: I was now into my eighties, and the pandemic had shut down our peregrinations and imprisoned us all in our homes.

Well, John sent a list of films and told me to get cracking! Missing from the list were my favorite films of Claude’s: Notorious, Deception, Casablanca, and Caesar and Cleopatra. While many people have asked me what it was like to see my father - as an actor - on the big screen, I had grown upon a farm without a lot of access to the big screen and, as a child, had seen only The Invisible Man in a movie theater. I was too busy taking care of the chickens, gathering berries with thorns, and believing my father was a farmer!

My first real theatrical experience was when Don Adams - of Get Smart fame - borrowed a good number of my father’s films from Warner Brothers and showed them to a small group of friends on a large screen in his house. I was well into my thirties when I experienced this, but it opened up my eyes to how gifted an actor he was. My father was not only a farmer, but also a brilliant film actor with a twinkle in his eye and a mostly sophisticated demeanor! I tackled the list from John and proceeded to write down my recollections, my remembrances of my childhood spent with this incredible man. And all sparked by the films I was asked to revisit!

My life with Mr. Claude Rains came swimming back in front of me, and his behavior and

bearing as an actor in these movies is so very reminiscent of the man I knew as my father. My father had an odd habit of clenching his fist when his hands were at his sides. I did this too, as an actor, and I caught my twelve-year-old granddaughter doing it in a play she was in. Is this stuff genetic? Guess so. The voice, of course, was the same everywhere, as was his straight-backed posture. He wore boots with lifts in them, and it was my chore to shine those boots every morning. He would place them outside his bedroom door at night, and I would wonder, What is it with that? Was it some kind of weird discipline? I hadn’t given it much thought until I began to have sleepovers at the homes of my girlfriends and noticed that they did not spend a good part of their mornings shining their father’s shoes.

It should be obvious by now that, while John has organized the materials herein, I am the family historian.

Still, the experience of seeing Claude portray characters who are quite other than himself, though – those out of sort types I mentioned before - is not so odd. He was so good that the very notion of him as my father slipped away as he became the characters he was portraying. Some of the films on our list were certainly not his best. Claude was a victim of the studio system, and Warner Brothers allowed him to turn down two films a year with the understanding that he had to do the third... which was not always to his liking. Although he was always good, the mediocrity of what he was appearing in often took precedent. Why was this? Why did he do those films? He was a hard worker who always did his best and never just sailed through anything. Nevertheless, an actor has to work. Work to keep working! Working to keep the creative juices flowing, and working, of course, to pay the bills.

He never talked about his work, at least not to me. But now I know that he knows how very proud I am of him as a father and an actor.

I hadn’t at any point even considered writing about myself, but John insisted...three times! Well, since he is the impetus behind this book, I must do what I am told. The book is his concept, his interest, and his is the publisher. When he asked me to climb on board, I didn’t, even for a minute, hesitate. So here goes.

I went to college in 1955 with every intention of becoming a social worker. That was probably due to the influence of the Quaker school I had attended for the previous six years. Somewhere along the way, in my junior year in college, I was visited by a cute redhead from nearby Williams College. That all-male school was looking for women to augment their drama department, and the head of the department had - at 10 years of age - been in a play with my father in England. Why that might have led him to believe that I could act was beyond me. But, what a way to meet preppy young men! So off I went to fill a void in their productions. It certainly was a lot of fun, but never did I think I wanted to act for the rest of my life. Still, after two years of everything from the Classical to the Musical, I was – as they say – bitten. (Looking back, how I graduated from Bennington as an art major while regularly driving back and forth the ten miles to the Williamstown theater, I’ll never know.) Initially, I was afraid to tell my father I wanted to be an actress, but I certainly did not have to pick him up off the floor when I did tell him. He said he’d give me a year in New York, and so I took on the task of learning how to act.

After having been trained in New York by Alan Miller, Uta Hagen, and Bill Ball, I ended up with Lee Strasberg, the infamous teacher of the private moment, that most terrifying of all exercises. Nonetheless, while the rest of us had to go through the requisite rigors, Dustin Hoffman would sit by himself in the back row, reading a newspaper. Without ever doing a scene or participating in an exercise, he apparently absorbed it all with perfection. I, on the other hand, wanted to do it all, experience it all, and flounder as much as need be. And, in addition to all this training, there were other classes as well: voice, dance, fencing... there was even a class in falling. I learned falling down stairs to perfection: relax, tuck, and roll, shoulders first. As accomplished as I was, I wondered just when would I ever be able to use such a skill?

Inasmuch as Claude had said that I should get to know all the aspects of theater, I took on many jobs backstage: I was the assistant stage manager; I ran the lighting board, I sewed costumes, and I served as understudy. I took pretty much anything I could get.

Along the way I married one of the lost boys from the Williamstown version of Peter Pan, wherein I played Tiger Lily. Eddie – my husband - had received a two-year stipend upon graduation (a year after me) to write poetry. We went off to Europe and settled first in London, where I auditioned for the Tavistock Repertory in Islington. I remember auditioning with a monologue and using an exercise I had learned in Uta Hagen’s class of extracting pertinent props - a hairbrush, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb, a wash cloth, and tampons - from a paper bag as the monologue droned on. (My audition must have had something to do with bathroom activity.) In England, though, this was not done...the prop thing, not the bathroom thing. One might render a speech from King Lear or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but messing with props in a paper bag was unheard of. Still, somehow I was awarded admittance into the rep company. I was over the moon until I was informed that this was totally illegal, as Americans were not allowed to work without a permit... which, at that time, was almost impossible to get.

Still, they began to do American plays and I was cooking! When in A View from the Bridge, I got a staggering review (Let’s see Miss Rains again!); a bit of an embarrassment, I thought, but certainly a validation that maybe I had some talent. One night, a representative from Actor’s Equity came to find that American who was working illegally. Our director saved the day by shoving me into a broom closet, and the curtain was held until Mr. Equity left in confusion.

Eddie and I began to travel and ended up in Paris where I joined The American Theater in Paris. Not as avant-garde as it sounds, the ATP was nothing more than a straggly group of stranded Americans who were looking for something to do. At one point, for example, we presented An Evening, which - as I remember - was quite awful. I had been given a scene from Shakespeare - something I should never do – but, thankfully, nothing ill came of it, and two years later we were in New York. Eddie soon got a job as a picture editor with Time/Life, and I, of course, pursued a career as an actor.

I began to get work. The first job was in Canada, doing summer stock: nine plays in ten weeks. Believe me, it is excruciating to rehearse one play during the day and perform a different one at night. Still, learning the lines became easy only because it had to be. A couple of summers in Canada were followed by a couple in Michigan in an old, beautiful WPA theater, where I experienced one of the highlights of my career: falling down a flight of stairs. As Nancy in the musical, Oliver, I sang, danced, and delivered lines in a Cockney accent. At the end of the play - when Nancy is shot -I relaxed, tucked, and rolled down that flight of stairs night after night for a week, the process I had learned in the falling down stairs class. I was in heaven!

In 1963, not long after Oliver, I was an understudy in an off-Broadway play that was directed by Albert Dekker, a family friend from Los Angeles. It was a short run, and I never got to play the part, yet, when closing notice was given for the show, Albert asked me if I wanted to get my Equity card. He offered to write me a special contract to play the part which I never had! So, off I went to the Equity office with my precious papers, knowing that, in a short while, I would be a legitimate actor, legitimately! I was a tad taken aback when I was informed that I could not keep my given name - Jennifer Rains - as there was an English actress by that same name. I was given three days to figure out what I wanted to do. I went home and called my parents, asking them to recall other names that they had considered prior to my birth. Hmmmmm... There was Elizabeth, and Antonia, and Jessica... Jessica was the best, in my opinion. But... this was a big deal, so I called my mother’s friend who was an adept at tarot cards. She did the three names on the tarot cards and told me the proverbial chosen name was Jessica. Back to the Equity office I went, and then onto the job of calling everyone I knew to inform them that I had a new name! Almost everyone was very good about it... except for Claude, who had a little troublewith the switch and would call me Jennifer Jessica for the rest of his life. I know... but he tried.

From much theater in and around New York, I graduated (so to speak) to television and many (about 50) commercials, which certainly paid the bills. State Farm, Space Sticks, CoolWhip, 7-Up, Pampers, Zest (soap), USDA Meat, McDonalds, and Nestle Tea, to mention a few...and yes, I had to fall backwards into a swimming pool, over and over again. While in New York, I never saw any of them because I didn’t have a TV set. And the biggest star I worked within commercials was Morris the cat! That was a thrill!

I was also involved in lots of small Off-Off-Broadway productions. Claude came to see me once at the infamous Cafe La Mama, a walk-up theater on 2nd Avenue. He was very concerned that the theater was a fire trap. I auditioned for Peter Bogdanovitch, a young director who was doing the Kauffman/Hart play, Once in a Lifetime. It was a non-Equity play, but I didn’t care and went back to being called Jennifer for the run. I had about three parts. The cast was huge, and the rehearsals mostly consisted of Peter telling us stories about his experiences in Hollywood. Our experience was all kind of loosey-goosey and, when the money finally ran out, Polly Platt - Peter’s wife and the costume designer - made me an exquisite ball gown out of her ar-tdeco shower curtain. It was beautiful in spite of its somewhat plastic feel.

One day during rehearsals, I got a call from Actors Equity, saying they wanted to see me. I was nervous about that one. I had worked hard to be eligible for the stage actors’ union and now I was in trouble. I was a union actor working in a non-union play. Upon arriving, I was lectured by a representative of the union, who then told me to put my hand on the table. He slapped my hand and told me to go back to work! What a relief!

During this time my marriage to Eddie fell apart. Off I went to Buffalo, New York, to do another Kauffman/Hart production, You Can’t Take It with You. During my audition, the director had asked me if I could dance sur la pointe: on toe. When he said I only needed to do a couple of steps, I bravely said Yes! When I got home, my phone was ringing. I got the part!

Whoops! I was caught in a lie. I went to the Carnegie Hall annex where I took dance classes and talked to my teacher. Please don’t tell me this is a bad idea, I said. I gotta do this. He sent me to Capezio to buy toe-shoes and then gave me some private classes so I could perfect the small amount of dancing I needed to do, maybe four or five steps. My character, Essie, was awkward, so I needn’t have looked professional; only slightly proficient. The problem was that I was in pain. And, of course, I did not want to get caught in my lie. So every morning, before rehearsal, I went off to the local hospital’s physical therapy department to soak my feet in therapeutic baths. And, yes, I did what I needed to do, on toe; actually, I did more than I needed to on toe.

Actors are really crazy. They will do almost anything to get a part! For example, I found out that the young man playing my husband had learned how to play the xylophone for his part! Another crazy! So, we fell in love. And married not too long after we met. Rick Lenz was an actor who was moving along quite quickly, and, during the Broadway production of Cactus Flower, he was noticed and brought to Los Angeles to play Arnold’s lawyer in Green Acres. (Arnold was a pig!) Moving to Los Angeles, I then auditioned for two years in the midst of all those blue-eyed, blond girls before Jack Lemmon, directing his first film, gave me my first cinematic role: Walter Matthau’s psycologist in Kotch.

I had never done a film before, and I was nervous, so I called my father. What do I do now? Just be honest, he said. And remember, don’t look at the floor! Many Hollywood hopefuls take classes in acting for film. I, on the other hand, was fresh out of New York and thus opted to take my father’s advice to just be honest: Don’t indicate, just think, and the camera will read your mind. From that point, with a God’s-honest motion picture under my belt and an agent who believed in my brown hair and my not turned-up nose, I did a bunch of films and a ton of television. Nothing huge, mind you; never starring or achieving any kind of notoriety.

Nonetheless, one day I got a phone call from a casting director about a George Scott film being done in Hawaii, Islands in the Stream. The director had given the casting director instructions to get him a Czech-looking actor to play an immigrant. The job would involve at least three weeks work on the island of Kauai. We chatted for about five minutes before he told me he was sorry he couldn’t send me off to Hawaii because he needed a Czech actor. But I am Czech, I said. My mother is Czech; both her parents were born in Bohemia and emigrated to New York many years ago. Do you have a passport? he asked. Uh-huh. Your plane leaves in three days.

I was there for five weeks, during which Hildy Brooks and I were rescued off a burning boat which we then had to drag up the Wailua River, plodding through the mud and water in our hot woolen dresses. George Scott drank too much, while David Hemmings organized gambling on the island. This was real filmmaking!

There was also a lot of television, mostly series or episodic work. Oddly, though, never a comedy. I was dying to be funny, but it never happened. I played everyone’s mother, everyone’s wife, an array of nurses, doctors, union organizers. One day, in the middle of a play group of five mothers and their children, I got a call from a casting person who instructed me to come immediately to the studio. Watch my kid, I said to the group and fairly flew to my car, only then noticing I had forgotten to put on my shoes. Yes, I went to the audition in my bare feet Jackie Cooper was looking for a Union Organizer...fast. The day before, the woman playing the part had been injured in a riot, a film riot, and a replacement was needed. This was Stand Up and Be Counted, the first women’s lib film, and starred Jacqueline Bisset and Hector Elizondo. I was directed to facilitate a riot in a bra factory, with the attendant waving of flags and busting out of windows. After about four days, Jackie Cooper told me he wanted to ask me a question. You’re not by any chance related to Claude Rains, are you? When I was a child, I was in a film with him. (1938’s White Banners) He then notified the art department and had a director’s chair made for me with my name on the back. Now that was exciting! I worked with Jackie Cooper again. He gave me the running part of the office manager in Feather and Father, a series about two detectives, played by Stephanie Powers and Harold Gould.

Then there was a film with Goldie Hawn which I was all but cut out of. The producer knew we were friends (Rick had been in the movie Cactus Flower with her) and thought it was a cute idea! It wasn’t! In between all this, I got a 13-week gig in a soap opera, Days of Our Lives. I had done The Secret Storm back in New York, playing a sixteen-year-old when I was 30, so I knew, if nothing else, how to memorize a lot of dialogue overnight. At that time, the soaps were live, and you were acting while they were on the air! That certainly added to the Great Fears: Fear of forgetting lines, Fear that someone else would forget lines, Fear of getting lines wrong. I played a young girl who supplied drugs to whoever wanted them. My character’s name was Piggy, I was padded, and, at one point, I had to cook some drugs in a spoon. I certainly didn’t know how to do that, so the director put out a call and some crew member slunk forward to show me how to do it.

Woody Allen called, and I went tearing over to the studio. Standing between his two assistants, he asked me questions without ever once looking at me. He asked if I had a head shot that I could leave with him. I reminded him that my agent had sent one over, but he wanted another. (What did they do with these head shots?) I dashed out to the car and dashed back. A couple of days later, I was working. The movie was Sleeper. Woody didn’t do a lot of directing. He trusted his actors, and it was nice to be trusted. I did have to shave my face with a straight edge razor on camera, and I quickly informed him that I had no idea how to do this. Neither did he. But between us and the entire crew, we figured it out.

Once I was hired solely because they needed someone who could memorize thirty pages of dialogue overnight.

After years of film, television and commercial, I did a play called Rubbers. I was signed on to be the stage manager and to understudy the female lead, an overexcited senator from NewYork. In between looking for mannequins, running rehearsals, and making sure the actors and crew were where they supposed to be when they were supposed to be there, I learned all the lines. The best and easiest part was a long, dirty joke about an octopus who was upset because she couldn’t have sex. It was a couple of pages long and so well written that I learned it in a flash.

And then I got that call... yes, yes... I really got it. For some reason, the actress playing the role of Mrs. Brimmins was no longer playing Mrs. Brimmins, and I would no longer be the stage manager. It was a joyous part for me to play. The play ran for as long as it was supposed to run, and I won a Drama Logue Award for playing the part of my dreams. At the award ceremony, with popcorn on the tables, I thanked the original actor playing Mrs. Brimmins for leaving.

This all sounds like I was constantly working....not true! I was constantly waiting for my agent to call, just like most actors. I loved the audition process. You drove to the locations where you ran into everyone your age that you knew. Then, script in hand, you read for some crazy part, and then went home and waited. There was always a slight fear that this would be your last job. But I was lucky, and I was having a great time. Still, at some point in my late forties, I woke up and realized I wasn’t so crazy about acting any more. There was something about always being told what to do...hit your mark, say your lines, speak, listen, blah blah blah. I had read a script I really liked and thought it should be made into a film. I wanted to do this, but didn’t have a clue how to go about it. So I applied to the well-respected Peter Stark Program at USC, which turned me down. I then applied to an independent Masters program at AFI, the American Film Institute. This was a real hands-on approach and, for some crazy reason, I was accepted. I was the oldest person in a class of 90 students, 30 of whom were producing fellows. I thought I didn’t have a clue. But when a young man raised his hand and asked what a honey wagon was, I knew my fears were unfounded. At least I knew what they called the bathroom on a film set. He did not. The program here required that each student had to produce three one-half-hour films during the year. Talk about throwing us to the wolves! But it worked; we learned hard and fast, out of necessity. Where and how to get film permits, what all the bits and pieces of the camera were used for, how to find a good script, how to cast, how to hire, and how to pull everyone together during shooting the project. I was in heaven. I was in such a heaven, I did four films instead of three. Each producer was given $375 per project to do the film (which was shot on video).

Billy Wilder spoke at our graduation. He told us to forge ahead. And I did. A couple of months afterwards, my classmate, Derryn Warren, called me and asked if I could produce a film for $45,000. She had met a man with cash in hand at a party and wanted a horror film to sell to the newly created video market. Sure, I said. What? Was I crazy? I had no idea if we could pull this off, but we dove in with crew of nine from our class at AFI. We shot the whole thing in my house in nine days. When the equipment arrived, we laid it all out on sound blankets in the living room, and I went into the bathroom and burst into tears. This was the most frightening thing I had ever done. Someone’s money was at stake, and I was responsible. I was producing, cooking, bookkeeping and pushing everyone ahead at an unlikely speed. One night, the cops knocked at the door because my neighbor thought I was running a whorehouse. We were mixing blood in the back yard and working ridiculous hours. We returned the equipment nine days later, and had a super-fast edit by the amazing Tony Miller. We sold that film at the Milan International Film Festival for five times what we made it for, and everyone got paid the points they were promised.

And so it went. And I was steadily working, which is exactly what I had always wanted. And I did this on my own, never asking my father for help. And he was very proud!

I produced ten films in eleven years. Admittedly, most were crap, but they sold to the video market and my executive producers - the ones with the money - were not displeased. The budgets went from $45,000 at first to $2 million, to finance a film shot in Belize. That film was a total failure due to the fact that the executive producer had stopped sending us money in the middle of the film. You can’t make a film without money. Our crew of about 45 and our cast were not going to work for nothing. Luckily, everyone had a round-trip ticket. I had originally been told to issue one-way plane tickets to everyone, despite the fact that the first rule of filming on location was to be sure the cast and crew could get home. Back in Los Angeles - and very much the worse for wear - I was called in to the SAG office at the bequest of one of the unpaid actors. It was a hearing, and I was not happy, but when I was asked how much I had been paid, I told them that - just like everyone else - not a penny had gone into my pocket. That ended that terrifying moment.

After several more films, I found that I was tired. It is a huge responsibility to take someone else’s money and give them a money-making project in return. Most of the time I was able to do that, but not always, and it weighed on me. I took a break. It was a big break. It was forever, and that was okay.

- Jessica Rains

INTRODUCTION

Way back when, I was given to understand that the word fan was but an abbreviated form of the term fanatic. Whilst that did seem fairly obvious (even to a second-grader like me), I felt that the Merriam-Webster definition of the latter – someone marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion – needed a bit of messing with to fit the former. Thus, I whittled away at the adjectives, leaving me with this chip off the old block: a fan is one marked by enthusiasm and often intense devotion. Sounded much more reasonable. Still, upon reflection, I reckoned that I was a fanatic... about the Brooklyn Dodgers. And, to be honest, everyone I knew who followed our Ebbets Field home team was excessively enthusiastic, excessively defensive, excessively in your face. Nobody was ever less than intensely devoted, either. So, Gil and Campy and the Duke et al - along with my absolute lust after Friday-night pizza from Cino’s (on la Avenida Dekalb, between i Viali Vanderbilt and Clermont) - were targets of my fanaticism. The confusing similarity between the terms fanaticize and fantacize also confounded the living hell out of me at first, and my yearning for the impossible - super powers (comic books cost but a dime back then) and Sophia Loren (Thank you, Million Dollar Movie!) - did nothing to help me differentiate the terms.

Anyhow, at some point, I heard this guy with a totally amazing voice. He sounded like no one and nothing I had heard before in the good old USA... especially in Brooklyn. When our monster club convened that Saturday right after my experience, I found that many of my fellow horror fans had felt the same way as I had, with our having witnessed the debut of The Invisible Man on Shock Theater a couple of nights before our meeting.

Those of us allowed to stay up on that school night began to share our opinions on the picture (which we really liked), on the actor (whom we immediately lumped together with the guy in Dracula and the other guy, in Frankenstein), and How the heck did they do that? (for us, the term special effects was still a ways off). If memory serves, we proposed a good number of possibilities vis a vis making that guy invisible – most of which bordered on the supernatural – before agreeing that the most probable, most professional way of doing that was... (we’re talking 7-9-year-olds in the late 1950’s now)... don‘t shoot his scenes with any film in the camera! Made perfect sense back then.

The TV Guide kept us monster club members apprised of which films were just waiting to scare us and which were good only for a shock (whatever that meant). Praised be to Guide, we avoided wasting our time on stuff like The Spy Ring, Sealed Lips, and Chinatown Squad. Instead, we kept track of which actors were in what pictures, while somehow becoming convinced that any of the Universal films that women starred in had nothing to offer fans like us. Before Son of Shock hit the small screen with pictures like Bride of Frankenstein and Captive Wild Woman, any female-oriented titles (Danger Woman, Weird Woman) we ran across were quickly felt to be total wastes of time. Instead, we sought out guys like Lugosi, Karloff, the Chaney kid (Junior? What?)... and Claude Rains, the guy with that amazing voice. Apparently, the only film he was in - other than The Invisible Man - was Mystery of Edwin Drood. Not wanting to miss out on another of Claude Rains’s incredibly weird characters, I again traded a string of B-pluses and A’s (awarded me by the good sisters of St. Joseph at St. Angela Hall Elementary School) for the right to stay up until someone had solved Edwin Drood’s mystery. Not having yet discovered Charles Dickens at that point in my life, I thought that anyone named Drood had to be some sort of freak, or an alien, or something. I must have bypassed the TV Guide’s mini-synopsis once I saw the name Claude Rains, or I would have played with the antenna while fully aware of what was about to transpire.

This time around, Mr. Rains was visible throughout the entire film. That voice! Couldn’t mistake that voice. But I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed in The Invisible Man: Claude Rains was kind of short. In my vast experience of all sorts of horror and science fiction films, nobody important – villains, heroes, principal characters – was short. I figured then that he wouldn’t survive the story. Either something magical would have to happen (the Drood mystery?) to make him taller – and thus more important - or to make the story end better. I was wrong on both counts, but it didn’t matter; I was hooked on this Claude Rains guy. I don’t know why... I was too young then to appreciate great acting when I saw it; there was just something about that actor.

Herein, we’re examining those projects which required that actor to tip a bit (or more) into the more unsettling aspects of Life... or the Afterlife! The MADNESS we allude to in our title refers not only to that condition in which our favorite thespian frequently found himself – at the operational end of a noose or a knife or some such; almost inevitably someone would be found at the business end – but also to tales wherein violence/insanity played a much less significant role, if present at all. Our cover art combines elements of Claude’s three most famous Universal horrors – The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941), and Phantom of the Opera (1943) – all of which found him less than totally cool, calm, and collected. In the first of the three films, he (the title character) fell under the spell of megalomania, brought on by his discovery of and dosing with monocaine; among the victims of his insanity was an entire trainload of innocents. The last of this Universal trio found him (again the title character) under the spell of music – you know, that which usually hath charms to soothe the savage breast (if you know your Congreve) – only to lose it when he (mistakenly) thought that the local music publisher had purloined his concerto, the sale of which was meant to finance the career of a young soprano for whom he cared. Again, he pulled off a wholesale massacre of the monied crowd in the stalls by sawing through the Paris Opera’s main chandelier during a sold-out performance of a successful, new opera.

In the second entry, Claude was doing just fine until the titular lycanthrope he clubbed to expiration turned out to be his son! Maria Ouspenskaya, the resident crone, then voiced the haunting epithet we had first heard after Lon Chaney, Junior, had brained Bela Lugosi’s werewolf – The way you walked was thorny though no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace for eternity – and Evelyn Ankers had tossed in a totally superfluous Larry! The end credits were on their way, but Claude’s Sir John Talbot was also obviously on his way... into shock and disbelief and madness.

But madness is not our only focal point herein. We will also examine the mythic, the magical, and the mysterious. We will put aside a more secular approach to life in order to view Claude calling the shots in both the sacred halls of Paradise as well as the gritty backrooms of the Netherworld. We see him on the quest for critters that went extinct millions of years ago as well as working like the dickens to forestall Earth’s suffering Doomsday from Outer Space! And we watch as – true to Dickens – he reacts to his needless murder of his own nephew over a romance that never was. And as he returned home from an inordinately lengthy vacation only to find himself astonished that Nazi-like forces have taken over the United States? Really? Were there no newspapers where he hung his fishing rod? Is he indeed the plaything of the Three Furies who seek to avenge his unpunished crimes? Does he truly exhibit the incredible gift – and the equally incredible curse – of second sight? What can have moved him to murder his daughter and then take his own life, if not dementia praecox? Thus we have Claude, if not mad himself, caught up in the madness of others, of the situation, of the moment! And these cases, dear reader, are to be found in his films; we’ll also discuss examples of Claude’s getting caught up yet again (and again...) in some of his appearances on television, his theatrical roles, and the meticulous care his awesome pipes received on radio series like Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Suspense!

In some of the projects/performances examined herein, Claude is not the recipient of, but rather a witness to some sort of off-thewallness that inhabits his immediate world. In several of the plays in which he appeared prior to his cinematic breakout role as Jack Griffin, his character was but one of several/many who were caught