Inextricably linked with the character of Count Dracula, Bela Lugosi played the role just twice in feature films on the silver screen (Dracula [1931] and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). But he portrayed the venerable vampire first, and far most frequently, on the stage, beginning with the star-making 1927 Broadway production. This was followed by tours and also by small-scale presentations in summer stock theaters, vaudeville houses---even Army camps.
     Lugosi may have had his final stateside "turn" as the Count in 1948, in a production of Dracula at Connecticut's Norwich Summer Theatre; the 65-year-old actor headed a cast that also included Richard Kiley as Jonathan Harker and Simon Oakland as Van Helsing. Supervising the production, and now here to paint a word-picture of Lugosi as he limned one of his final vampire portrayals: the show's director Ted Post.
     Born March 31, 1918, Post cut his show business teeth on the stage in his native New York, directing children's programs at community centers. After making a name for himself through years of outstanding theater work, Post segued into the adventurous arena of early television. He has since directed some of the medium's biggest stars on popular shows such as Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Thriller, Columbo, and many more; he has also directed feature films ranging from Clint Eastwood's Hang 'em High and Magnum Force to Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Go Tell the Spartans. Returning to his theater roots, Post recently directed the 2001-02 Festival of the Arts at Bel-Air's University of Judaism.

How many years had you been directing for the stage when Dracula came along?

     I started thinking seriously about becoming involved in the theater in 1938 or '39. My friend Alan Manson and I were ushering at the Loew's Pitkin Theater in Brooklyn on weekends to make money for our schoolbooks and so on. Alan would get up on the stage at midnight, after the audience had left the theater, and he would do monologues and soliloquies from Shakespeare. Not yet being involved in theater, or even thinking of ever becoming part of it, I was kind of stunned by his comfort, his ease, his way of doing something that seemed to convey so clearly the character, whether it was Hamlet or Richard III or Henry. He was beyond belief, I was kind of stunned that he had this kind of ability. I said to him, "Are you an actor?"---I'd just met him---and he said, "yeah." I asked, "Where do you act?" He said, "When I can get a job, in summer stock." I said, "Wall Street? Stock in Wall Street?" [Laughs] He said, "No, no, no. Summer stock is theater activity during the summer in various different towns. For eight, ten, twelve weeks, they do one play a week. Usually I'm involved with one of those companies."

And that was the point at which you began to get interested.

     I'll tell you how interested I was---while I was ushering, I would get so fascinated with what I was looking at on the movie screen that sometimes I'd forget to take the people down to their seats. I'd stop in the aisles and get caught up with what was going on on-screen!
     I later joined the Hebrew Educational Society in Brownsville, a group looking to fill a part called "Dr. Karlsen" in Professor Mamlock. I read and I got the role. Not that I was that good---I was awful!---but they needed someone. After I'd done some acting, I decided I wanted to really learn a lot about the world of show biz and I went to Tamara Daykarhanova, who was formerly an actress with the Moscow Art Theater. She'd come to the States with the Moscow Art Theater, she and Stanislavsky, she decided to stay and she formed an actors' workshop. I read for her and she said, "My God, you have to learn quite a bit" [Laughs]. But she said I had some kind of charisma, even though it was not rooted in anything that resembled great experience, and she said she'd take a chance on me. So I got an acting scholarship and I worked on learning what the actors' problems were, so I could understand the actors’ language. You have to be able to get them to grab hold of your ideas, get them to know how to utilize them effectively.
     My first professional summer theater experience was at Cedarhurst, Long Island, where I directed ten plays in ten weeks starting with Claudia. In 1946, after I came back from the Army, I had my second summer job, which was in Clinton, New Jersey. I had Olive Deering and Annie Jackson and Beatrice Blau---very wonderful people---in this particular acting group. The results were unbelievable, the reviews were unbelievable. That's how my career began, because of the quality work that I did in a very short time, in four, five days. Sometimes in two, three days!
     In 1947 I directed at Yardley, Pennsylvania, and then Herb Kneeter, who was the producer at the Norwich Summer Theatre, called me up and asked me whether I'd come in and direct in 1948. The first thing we did there was The Glass Menagerie. I had as my star Susan Peters, who was once under contract to Metro, but who was now in a wheelchair, permanently paralyzed from the waist down, because she had shot herself accidentally a few years earlier. We got great reviews.

When Bela Lugosi came in to do Dracula, where did you meet him for the first time?

     He came to the theater, he and his wife Lillian, and I met him and we sat down and talked. There seemed to be a strain there, and his wife was more talkative than he, evidently trying to be very helpful and to "un-strain" him, because he was tense.
     Before I go into that, let me say this: My initial feeling about meeting Lugosi was that I was going to get even with him, because when I first saw the film Dracula, he scared me so badly that for many years I had to sleep with the light on! I kept hearing him say "I am Drac-u-la," and his walking toward me awakened all those dark feelings. I explained this to him, I told him he had scared the hell out of me [in Dracula], and he said, "I did?" I said, "Yes, you did! It was a very frightening performance. And now I wish to make sure that, when we do it in this theater, that you have the same effect on people coming to this theater to see the show. Let's make it happen." He said, "We will, we will...."

Telling him how much Dracula scared you---did that help "un-strain" him and break the ice?

Now you began rehearsing the play with Lugosi and the rest of the players?

     Yes, for a few days in the daytime, because at nighttime we had another show going.

The process was that you'd do a play at night and rehearse the next week's play in the daytime....?

     That's exactly what summer stock was about. It took about five days to get shows on their feet. I found Bela to be always interested...always listening to what I was saying...always telling me that he understood my suggestions and direction. But then, after he said he understood, never ever doing what I hoped that he understood.

What was your direction?

Before we go any further---who picked the plays for the Norwich Summer Theatre, and what was your reaction when it was decided to make Dracula one of the plays?

     Herb Kneeter could have picked them---we worked with Kneeter on picking some of the plays. As for the choice of Dracula...well, first of all, it made me nervous a little bit just to deal with the guy [Lugosi] who scared the hell out of me. But I met him and, it turns out, I loved him. He was a very nice man, very quiet man. He told me, "Listen, I played leading roles in theater in Europe. I was a leading man. To come to Hollywood and get stuck in this one part [Count Dracula] has been the bane of my existence." He said he wanted to change and do other kinds of roles. And on one occasion he did: In Ninotchka [1939] with Greta Garbo, he played a Russian commissar and he did that beautifully. He played a strong commissar, a believer in what he had to do, which was to fall in line with the Communist beliefs, etc. He was a very good actor, a highly intelligent actor, and he proved it by just that one role with Greta Garbo, which he did brilliantly, I thought it was wonderful. We had little chats like that. Not too many---just little ones.

When he talked to you about his Hollywood typecasting, was he matter-of-fact about it, or unhappy, or worked up, or....?

     He was not happy about it, but he was...ironic. Ironically biting about it. He had a bite to his humor. One other thing I remember, and which startled the hell out of me, was when the Lions Club in (I think) Norwich wanted to honor him at a luncheon. Someone from the Lions Club asked me to ask Bela whether he would like to be honored, would he like to sit with them and have a meal with them and take a nice, healthy slap on the back. Bela said yes to me, so I called the people back and I said, yes, he'll have lunch. They asked, "You coming too?" "If you want me, yeah." So we sat at the head table, on the stage, kind-of, and they had Bela get up and make a speech. Off-the-cuff.
     Well...he knocked everybody for a loop. He was so brilliant, so funny, so satirical, so insightful. He spoke so beautifully, and in such a funny, comical, ironic way, that everybody was in tears with laughter. I never forgot that. I didn't realize that he had this kind of insight or this kind of information or this kind of knowledge, and the ability to present it in a very funny, satirical, ironic light.

What was he speaking about? His career? The world at large?

     He had a full, rich knowledge of current events and history, and the film and theatrical professions, and he spoke about his career and about Hollywood. I wish I'd had a recording machine and been able to capture that speech. He got such huge applause at the end, they wouldn't let him go---and we had to go back to rehearsal! The applause was so prolonged I had a hard time getting him back to rehearsal.

How many people were at that luncheon?

     Oh, it was packed.

Once Dracula opened, did he pick up the pace the way you kept asking him to?

     On opening night, before the curtain went up, I asked him again to pick up the tempo a bit. I said, "It will help make the moments a little more exciting, a little more vibrant, just by doing that." He said, "I'll do it, Ted." And then he did it slower. I went backstage after the first act and I told him, "Bela, please, it's gotten slower." He said, "I thought I picked up the tempo." I said, "No, Bela, it went slower. And what's happening is, the scenes are flattening out. They're becoming less interesting by doing it with that slow pace." He said, "I'll pick it up in the second act." So he went back on stage, and it was even slower, the second act. Afterward, I went back again to his dressing room---and his wife was there, putting a needle into his arm.
     I thought it was heroin. So he was taking a lot of drugs, and I didn't know it. I opened the door, to his dressing room, and there she was, his wife, doing that. He was not shocked by my entrance, and neither was she. I guess they assumed that everybody knew this about them. I said, "I'll come back later"---but I didn't. I didn't talk to him again that night, after seeing that. After seeing what I saw, I knew I was wasting my breath. I knew that any direction given to him would fall on deaf ears.
     Years later, Peter Lorre played one of the leading roles in an episode of Rawhide that I was directing ["Incident of the Slavemaster," 1960]. One day he came over to me and said he wasn't feeling well, that he had a huge headache and didn't feel as if he could do the scene. I said, "I'll jump to another scene while you rest up a bit, and we'll see whether you feel better." He said, "No, no. I'll tell you what I'll do...give me a few minutes, and I'll be all right." "Okay," I said, "take whatever you need."
     He came back about 10 to 15 minutes later and said, "I feel better." Then, the next day, the same thing happened again. So I got suspicious. And when he said, "I'll be back in ten minutes," I followed him. He had drugs---he took a shot of heroin, or coke, or whatever it was he used. Then he vomited. I was watching him. Then I rushed back to work, and a few minutes later he came back and he said, "I feel better now" and he did the scene! He was another great talent---as probably Bela was, a terrific talent.

You mentioned earlier that your career got off to a good start because of your quality work in these quickly done shows. What was the secret of your success with them?

     Knowing what I had to do in order to communicate my ideas to the actors, to get what I needed. I never let anything happen on the stage that was unmotivated. It was all clearly spelled out. One thought ignited another, and it looked real, and there was energy and there was rhythm and there was timing---all those things that you don't see in summer theater. Usually you see very ragged performances. I never allowed that. I always motivated and justified it for them. That's how I built my reputation, through summer theater---a lot of summer theater.

Did you ever do that for Lugosi---give him motivation and justification to pick up the tempo?

     If I'm remembering right, I gave him a direction that went, "You're on a deadline. You can't wait for the sun to rise, you've got to accomplish all your mission within these few hours. I think you should be consciously aware of that so that, as a result of that, there'll be more energy injected into the scene and into the character. That will make the scene vibrate a little more, in a more theatrical, interesting way." He said he understood me---but he didn't do it....

And the other actors?

     When I told Dick Kiley or Si Oakland or [leading lady] Shirley O'Hara, they picked up tempo. Period. There was no hemming and hawing about that. With Bela, he thought he did it. But he was so heavily on drugs that he wasn't able to evaluate for himself that he was not picking up tempo.

What are some of your memories of Kiley and Oakland?

     Richard Kiley was my discovery. I was directing The Corn Is Green for Equity Library in New York and he came late, after all the parts were taken. When he came in and asked "Anything available?" I said, "Nothing. What do you do?" He said, "I can sing and I can act." Then he sang a few bars, and he stunned me. I said, "I'll put you in the chorus." I worked with him in the chorus, and he seemed like somebody worth knowing and worth dealing with. Later I asked him, "Would you like to join me in summer repertory at Norwich Summer Theatre, as my leading man?" And that's when Richard Kiley became my leading man---he did ten weeks worth of work there, and he brought his wife and children.
     Si Oakland was another one who I loved very much. I saw him in something somewhere, he read for me and I said, "My God, I want you to be part of it." So he became part of my summer resident company there, with Shirley O'Hara. Shirley was a dark-haired, beautiful girl, and a very wonderful actress to boot. She was a girl who always looked younger than her age. She may have been 40 [in Dracula], but she looked 25. Shirley was also a critic, a writer for THE NATION. Very bright. Anyway, I had a great, wonderful little company there.

How did these other actors get along with Lugosi?

     There were no conflicts at all. Except, occasionally, you may have heard a mumble, someone saying, "I wish he'd pick up his cue." They wished Bela would move a little faster, in other words. I would hear that. And, had he done that, it would have helped the show quite a bit. But he was not at that moment capable of doing that...or even capable of knowing that he was not capable of doing it. He assumed he was capable of doing it. Which tells me he was a bit heavily into things [drugs] that prevented him from really recognizing that he was not fulfilling the concept of pace.

So your fondest memory of him is from the Lions Club luncheon.

     He loved that, he loved the idea that he would attend an affair like that and be their principal speaker. It was a different Bela Lugosi that afternoon, a Bela Lugosi I did not see in the theater while we were working together. In the theater, I saw a very serious guy who came to work and looked at what it was that I was trying to do with the particular show, or a particular scene, etc. And I gathered that he was analyzing his coworkers to see whether they (or I) were up to snuff, whether we knew what we were talking about or didn't know what we were talking about. He never said anything actually negative to me. He seemed to assume that what I was doing seemed to work, and he never asked me any questions.

Where did Lugosi stay while he was working there with you?

     I don't know which particular place he stayed at. We stayed at Mrs. Caulfield's---she had a home where she rented out rooms. I know Bela wasn't there---he and I would have been a little more intimate, socially, if he had. He was at some other place that Herb Kneeter arranged for him.

In one Lugosi biography, the author claims that Bela stayed in a hotel---and got some local publicity by having a coffin brought up to his room and sleeping in it.

     Nothing like that ever happened. I would have heard of that. And Kneeter would have had a fit.

Did he do his own makeup?

     I don't think he wore any makeup at all. His look was his look. If he did wear makeup, it was so subtle that I didn't see it as makeup.

And his wife, Lillian?

     He was very jealous of Lillian, I think. She was very worried about forming any kind of a relationship with a man. She was not a very giving person---the reason being that she was a little bit frightened of him, thinking that if she gave you a little more attention than she should have, he would be suspicious that perhaps there was something else going on. I had a strange feeling that she kept away from other men in his presence.

How popular was your production of Dracula?

     We didn't have packed houses. We usually had a half a house, something like that.

Was that about average for a play at Norwich?

     It was dependent on the play and the people, etc., and the interest the public had in that particular play. Sometimes we'd have a packed house, sometimes we'd have a half a house. It depended on what they wanted to see at that time. With Dracula, about a half a house, or three-quarters. But sometimes even less than a half.

And what were your feelings about it after it ended its run? Did you feel it was successful "artistically," or---

     No, I did not. I did not feel that I had what I wanted from Bela. Bela to me was basically the problem. Not Richard Kiley or Si Oakland or any of the other members of the cast. Si was brilliant in Dracula. Si was always brilliant. Si and Richard were my pride and joy---and so was Shirley O'Hara.
     They were all terrific performers. And they had a lot of pressure to do a lot of work in five days---to put on a two-act play or a three-act play in five days, with a lot of "sides" to it. I envied them, I envied them that they had the kind of brains that could do that! But Richard Kiley, after the seventh week at Norwich that summer, suddenly found himself spouting lines from the first week [laughs]! He got lost and carried away, and he didn't even know he was saying lines from other weeks! He said to me, "I think I'm overworked," and I told him to take a week off, to get his brains settled!

Jonathan Harker is a pretty thankless role. Was Kiley able to do anything with it?

     Yes. Richard Kiley was a very imaginative actor. He was somebody who would take a role and make choices that would bring more life to the character, give it more vibrancy and more energy. He'd come up with thoughts and ideas that would make it unique. Richard and Si liked to give "twists" to the character that would lend another aspect to it, an aspect that was not thought of by the playwright.

The actor who played Van Helsing in the 1931 Dracula movie was just as slow-tempoed as Lugosi was. Did Oakland make something out of it?

     Always. The vitality came from my resident company. We pumped up the energy with the Oaklands, with the Kileys, with the O'Haras and a few others who were there. I had them move as though there were always the threat of something, like the Sword of Damocles was over the heads of everyone and they had to do something about it. It gave it a rhythmical thrust of urgency.

How long were you at the Norwich Summer Theatre?

     I went there from 1948 up to '50. But in 1950, I got into a hassle with Kneeter. I was directing Eve Arden in some play, I finished with her and then I got into a hassle with Kneeter. He did some really terrible things, and I felt that he was hurting not only the theater, he was hurting practically everybody involved with the theater. So I quit. I took my wife and child back with me to New York.

Your lasting impressions of Bela Lugosi? When you think back on him today, what's the first thing that enters your mind?

     I think of him as a man who should have had better opportunities, who should have been allowed [by Hollywood] to play the kinds of roles he played before he came to America. He was a Hungarian leading man. He should have been given more opportunities to play other kinds of roles. But that was something he had a tough time convincing the Hollywood moguls to do---and which they did not do. He was not in any way encouraged by the people he worked for in Hollywood. They didn't give him any opportunities, except maybe the wonderful director who did Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch was the one who gave him the opportunity to play something else besides an ogre. So Bela found himself doing horror pictures, even doing some of the Frankenstein pictures---he found himself doing all these particular studies that were rooted in the same thing that built his reputation, which was Dracula.
     For some reason, people seemed to cotton to that type of character. To this day! Horror pictures are big, big commercial box-office hits, they make millions and millions of dollars. It stuns me to find that audiences throughout the country, and even the world for that matter, dig this type of material. They understand it and they like it. I can understand it when it's done brilliantly. I like when things are done with a great deal of subtlety. But when you have a guy coming at you with a chainsaw...that's not so subtle [laughs]!
     Lugosi had a very subtle way of playing his character. One thing he did do, which I liked very much about him, even though he was slow: He did Dracula as a romantic. A man in love. That's what made it palatable. That's what made him viable. Sometimes Dracula would make a remark and suddenly you saw another side to the man, you felt like the man really wanted to be human again, but it was a hopeless dream. He could never be human again. Bela gave it that kind of twist, you could tell that he wished he could come back to life again and be normal and live a life of love and all of the other things that were denied him as a corpse.
     All in all, in an odd sort of way, it was a rich and multicolored experience [working with Lugosi], and one that I treasure.

Sincere thanks to Mark Clark, Gary Rhodes and Diane Norman.