After appearing in a number of silent films in Hungary and Germany, Bela immigrated to the United States, settled in New York City, and began touring the East Coast with a small stock company of other Hungarian actors. His first appearance on Broadway was in a 1922 production of The Red Poppy. More Broadway shows followed, as well as his first film appearance in a 1923 melodrama called The Silent Command.
It was in 1927 that Bela was cast to star in the successful Broadway production of Dracula, and he was promptly summoned to Hollywood, where he worked in the new medium of “talkies” and married wife number two, a wealthy widow named Beatrice Weeks, who filed for divorce after four months and named actress Clara Bow as the correspondent.
Universal Pictures released Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, in 1931, and both a major box-office hit and an icon were born. Bela was immediately signed to a contract with Universal, and marriage number three came along, this one in 1933, to a young Hungarian woman named Lillian Arch. Their child, Bela G. Lugosi, was born in 1938, and this marriage lasted until 1953.
Between his remarkable performance as the world’s most famous vampire and his thick eastern European accent, which served him well for roles as a horror villain, Bela found it difficult to expand his acting career into a wider variety of roles. The titles alone of his next six films, in which he costarred with fellow thriller movie king Boris Karloff, both exemplified and exacerbated the typecasting that stood in the way of more traditional parts: The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, Son of Frankenstein, Black Friday, and The Body Snatcher.
In 1936 Universal’s new management dropped horror films from its production slate, which reduced Bela to a string of low-budget nonhorror roles and lead roles in some equally low-budget independent thrillers as well as whatever stage roles he could find. His career and earning power predictably declined, as did his own financial stability. He did land and succeed in the coveted role of the hunchback Ygor in Son of Frankenstein in 1939 as well as a “normal” and prestigious role in Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka. But the stardom he’d achieved in Dracula seemed to be gone forever.
Adding to Bela’s troubles, beginning in at least the late 1930s, was the onset of severe sciatica—compression of the sciatic nerve that causes often extreme, radiating back, pelvic, and leg pain. He became dependent on morphine and methadone and, by the end of the 1940s, when he made the last “A” movie of his career, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, word of his drug dependence had spread throughout the film industry. Work was sparse and undistinguished through the early 1950s, and in 1953 his twenty-year marriage to Lillian Arch ended in divorce. By 1955 his life had declined into obscurity, virtual poverty, and addiction. He voluntarily committed himself to a treatment center in Norwalk, California, and was released later that year.
Hope, such as it was, had arrived in about 1952, though, in the form of a filmmaker named Ed Wood Jr., generally considered to be one of the most artless, incompetent directors in the history of motion pictures. Ed Wood was a Bela Lugosi fan; he tracked him down and offered him parts in upcoming films. Bela was in no mental, professional, or financial position to say no, and the Wood-Lugosi collaboration resulted in a brief series of films so inadvertently ridiculous that they’ve developed cult followings: Glen or Glenda? in 1953, Bride of the Monster in 1956, and the impossibly bad Plan Nine from Outer Space, released in 1958 after Bela’s death.
Bela did find a fifth wife, Hope Linninger, whom he married in 1955, and that same year, after he’d been released from drug treatment, he made one last non–Ed Wood film, The Black Sheep, released in 1956. Bela made several personal appearances to promote the film, despite the fact that in the last legitimate movie of his life, he played the part of a mute, without a single line of dialogue.
On August 16, 1956, Bela Lugosi died quietly of a heart attack in his home in Los Angeles. Out of love and respect, Bela Jr. and his mother, Lillian, insisted that he be buried in his Dracula cloak as they believed he would have wanted. His body was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, and his grave remains a popular site on some of the more cult-oriented Hollywood tours.
From Sylvia
In the early 1980s I was invited by the late, great paranormal investigator Nick Nocerino and a paranormal photographer to accompany them on a trip to explore the Bela Lugosi house. I admit it, I accepted the invitation for one reason: I leapt at every possible opportunity to work with Nick. As for Bela Lugosi, the truth is, I neither knew nor cared much about him. Not only was he a little before my time—Dracula was a hit five years before I was born—but I’ve never made it all the way through any vampire movie without either falling asleep or involuntarily snickering, probably because it’s hard to be frightened of something I don’t believe exists. My loss, I’m sure, and no fault of Mr. Lugosi’s performance. But when Nick, Chuck, and I arrived at the house, I can’t stress enough how underwhelmed I was expecting to be, touring the home of a long-dead actor who was best known for a film I didn’t enjoy, especially when I was in the midst of a crushing schedule and had a million other things I’d rather have been doing.
It was late evening when our van parked in front of the vacant, sadly rundown property. Nick had done his homework on Bela Lugosi and volunteered to tell me about him while he strapped a lot of incomprehensible equipment on me. I stopped him from saying a word—I prefer to walk into a paranormal investigation “clean,” with as little information and as few predispositions as possible.
Once I was fully wired and Nick and Chuck were ready with their amazing battery of devices, we headed toward the main house of the oddly configured compound. The buildings formed a square around a courtyard with a fountain in its center that I imagined might once have been attractive. To the left of the courtyard were stairs that led to a row of rooms accessed by a narrow balcony, creating the effect of a sad motel that had long since gone out of business. The main house was to the right, completely separate from those drab abandoned rooms.
The moment we stepped through the massive doors of the house I felt almost choked by the oppressive distress that still hung in the dead air, some thick aftertaste of depression and hysteria left behind like a force field by someone dark who’d lived there. Nick, Chuck, and I explored every square inch of that house, and while all three of us were resisting an impulse to head back to the car and race to the nearest place we could find where there might be happiness or where it seemed as if someone might have at least laughed once or twice in the last century, we didn’t sense a trace of anything paranormal within those walls. There were no ghosts in the house, no spirits, nothing at all to alert the gauges and sensors we were lugging along with us. After a half hour or so we returned to the courtyard, and as we pulled those huge wooden doors closed behind us, I remember taking long deep breaths of fresh air to try to wash that darkness out of my system.
Next we climbed the stairs to those oddly separate rooms across the courtyard. We didn’t speak a word to each other, but my guess was that after finding the main house so ghost- and spirit-free, Nick and Chuck were expecting as much as I was that we were about to explore nothing but the same musty gloom we’d just trudged through.
It shocked me that, as we neared the top of the stairs, I was suddenly hit with a wave of panic so strong and overwhelming that, I promise you, I would have turned and run as far and fast as my legs would carry me, if I’d been there alone. Nick recorded my description of the dread I was feeling about whatever was waiting at the top of those stairs, and at my insistence we stopped long enough for me to say a prayer and put a circle of the white light of the Holy Spirit around the three of us to protect us before we stepped onto the narrow balcony and opened the first door.
I was instantly transfixed by the nightmare of horrifying images inside that small room. There seemed to be people everywhere, all of them in black, Goth before it became fashionable. They all had blank, chalk-white faces with hollow eyes and the darkest red lips. They were talking to each other unintelligibl
y, in a hushed, droning monotone. Three of them were flailing around the room, arms waving wildly, insanely falling into everyone in their path. Four others were lying limp and crumpled on the floor. One of them was slowly and deliberately cutting his arm, letting his blood drain into the glass he was holding, and then passing the glass around the room for everyone to drink from. As each of them took a sip, they swooned into a mirthless euphoria as if they’d just shared some kind of grotesque Communion.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear, until finally Nick’s voice penetrated what felt like a frozen trance, yelling, “Sylvia! Listen to me! Get the hell out of there! Now!” Apparently, according to the gauges strapped all over me, my temperature was spiking in that ice-cold room, I was being assaulted with so much electromagnetic energy that I was on overload, and my pulse was racing out of control. I knew what had held me so psychically captive was my certainty that I’d just witnessed a crowd of earthbound spirits, dark and futile, trapped in a perpetual rite of drugs, despair, and death.
Nick pulled me out of the room and slammed the door, and he and Chuck bolted toward the stairs. My impulse was to bolt right along with them, but I couldn’t ignore the energy that was pulling me to a second door just a few feet away. My hand was already on the doorknob when Nick yelled from the bottom of the stairs, “Where are you going?”
“We have to look in here before we go,” I called back.
He and Chuck were with me in seconds, protective and concerned for my safety as always, and they were right behind me as I opened the second door and stepped into the pitch-black room. Once my eyes had adjusted I could make out a large horizontal shape that looked as if it might have been an oversized couch against the far wall, but I caught my breath when I realized that no, what I was looking at was a gleaming wooden casket, open to reveal the earthbound spirit of Bela Lugosi himself, wrapped in his signature cape, lying in the satin lining of his coffin, eyes open and empty.
He slowly sat up, and he looked directly into my eyes, as cold and godless as any ghost I’ve ever seen. “You weren’t invited,” he said in a hollow voice.
“No, I wasn’t,” I whispered back. “I’m sorry for the intrusion.”
We stepped back out onto the balcony and closed the door. Nick and Chuck were visibly shaken—they hadn’t seen or heard what I had, but they’d heard my reply to the lifeless life in that room and felt the dark hopelessness of the energy we’d just confronted. We didn’t say a word as we walked back down the stairs to the courtyard. We were all thoroughly depleted, and we sat by the dry fountain for a long time before I finally turned to Nick and said, “Okay. Now you can tell me about Bela Lugosi.” He told me the story you’ve just read, and we held hands and prayed for those poor lost souls before we left.
From Francine
Bela is no longer earthbound. A very short while ago, maybe twenty years in your time, he freed himself, but he turned away from the Other Side and went to the Holding Place instead. He hasn’t yet reincarnated.
Chris Farley
Actor and comedian Christopher Crosby Farley was born on February 15, 1964, in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the five children of Thomas Farley, owner of a paving company, and homemaker Mary Anne Crosby Farley. The family was close-knit Irish Catholic, and Chris received his early education in Catholic schools. He graduated from the Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1986 after focusing his studies on theater and communications. His professional comedy career got its start at Madison’s Ark Improv Theater and Chicago’s Improv Olympic Theater. But it was at the famed Second City Theater in Chicago, where Lorne Michaels, creator of television’s landmark series Saturday Night Live, discovered Chris Farley and signed him to the cast in 1990.
Chris was one of Saturday Night Live’s most versatile and innovative comedians, creating a variety of characters and performing hilarious impersonations of such celebrities as Dom DeLuise, General Norman Schwarzkopf, Carnie Wilson, and Rush Limbaugh. He was also part of a group that came to be known as the “bad boys of SNL,” which included cast mates David Spade, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and Rob Schneider, whose off-stage pranks were often as notorious as their onstage comedy.
Between 1992 and 1995 Chris began making cameo appearances in such films as Wayne’s World, Coneheads, and Billy Madison. When his SNL contract ended after the 1994–95 season, he devoted all his professional energy to films, costarring with his SNL cast mate and friend David Spade in the successful comedies Tommy Boy and Black Sheep. His “bankability” was rewarded with a lead role in the equally successful Beverly Hills Ninja in 1997.
Sadly, by now Chris, following in the footsteps of his equally gifted idol John Belushi, was battling severe problems with obesity, drugs, and alcohol. He sought treatment more than a dozen times before attending rehab in 1997, again unsuccessfully. Production of his last film, Almost Heroes, was delayed more than once due to his declining health and progressing addictions, and he was in shockingly tenuous shape during his final Saturday Night Live guest appearance on October 25, 1997.
Chris Farley, at the age of thirty-three, died in his Chicago apartment on December 18, 1997, from a cocaine- and morphine-related heart attack. His funeral in Madison was attended by more than five hundred friends and family members, who gathered to honor his far too brief life.
From Francine
Chris was distraught and disoriented when he returned Home. Not even the large crowd of friends—including John Belushi and a tall, husky man I believe was his maternal grandfather—could comfort him. A spirit cannot fully experience the sacred peace and exhilaration of life on the Other Side when such pervasive hollow depression has separated it from its faith, its cognitive abilities, and its capacity for joy, and Chris’s Spirit Guide immediately took him to the Hall of Wisdom, where he was cocooned.
And then something happened that’s very rare here. Chris emerged from being cocooned, quickly realized that he’d been too eager to resume his life to stay as long as he needed, and was cocooned again, with more intensive therapy this time, particularly from one of his closest friends and advisors at Home, a Sikh guru named Amar Das. By the time his second cocooning ended, Chris was fully healed and had evolved into his thirty-year-old visage: a slender, six-foot-tall man with long, jet black hair, and delicate, almost beautiful features.
It will come as no surprise to everyone on earth who knew Chris well that he is a highly advanced soul, a giving, loving light who is much beloved on the Other Side. He is still a devout Catholic, and he’s resumed teaching his brilliant classes in world religions. He is also a gifted and very popular classical dance teacher and swimming instructor. He and John Belushi love performing rock-and-roll with a variety of other musicians, including Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding, with Chris on drums; and Chris’s open-air house on the plains of what corresponds to your North American Midwest is home to any of his world religion students who are in early preparation for new incarnations.
Several hours before Chris’s father’s body died, Chris retrieved his spirit, escorted him through the tunnel, and brought him Home, where he was cocooned as well. Chris and his father, Tom, were brothers in Switzerland in the late 1600s and deeply devoted to each other, and Chris spoke often of how he felt as if, by remaining obese despite the threat it posed to his health, he could somehow make his equally obese father feel less inappropriate. Tom will return to Chris’s house with him when he emerges from the cocooning chamber and resume his work as a film historian.
Chris has no plans to reincarnate, but he does visit his mother and his friend David Spade often.
Eva Gabor
Eva Gabor, the beautiful, utterly delightful actress often referred to as the “talented Gabor,” was born on February 11, 1921, in Budapest, Hungary. Her father, Major Vilmos Gabor, a jeweler, and his wife, Jolie, were blessed with three daughters—Zsa Zsa, Magda, and Eva. Eva was a born performer, working as an ice skater and cabaret singer after graduating from the Forstner Girls Instit
ute in Budapest. She and her mother and sisters immigrated to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, and Eva eventually made her way to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. She was quickly signed to a contract with Paramount Pictures and made two films in 1941, Forced Landing and Pacific Blackout.
After supporting roles in several movies in the 1940s, Eva finally attracted the critical and popular attention she deserved in the 1950 Broadway production of The Happy Time. She was inexplicably passed over for the film version, but returned to Hollywood anyway and resumed her movie career, most notably in The Mad Magician with Vincent Price and in 1958’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Gigi, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Her charm and irresistible sense of humor made her a popular television guest as well, especially on such classic game shows as The Match Game, Password, and Tattletales.
It was in 1965 that she truly captured the hearts of the American public, when she debuted as Eddie Albert’s wife on the CBS series Green Acres. Her business acumen inspired her to capitalize on her popularity during the five-year run of Green Acres and her long overdue “name value” by forming her own wig company, Eva Gabor International, which continued to thrive long after the series ended.
While Eva’s older sister Zsa Zsa was busy making headlines with her brash, contentious behavior and her lengthy string of marriages (the total currently stands at nine), Eva was living a comparatively peaceful life, with only five husbands and one headline-making encounter with police. In her case, Eva was the victim. In 1964, she was beaten by two gunmen who broke into her Miami apartment and stole her $25,000 diamond ring. (The robbers were ultimately arrested, but the ring was never recovered.)
After her fifth marriage ended, Eva bought and settled into an exquisite home near Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills with her five beloved dogs, and for many years she was the devoted companion of her great friend Merv Griffin. She remained close to her mother, Jolie, and her sister Magda, who were living two hours away in Palm Springs by then, but had a difficult, on-again, off-again relationship with Zsa Zsa. It was a source of irritation to Eva that she was frequently mistaken for Zsa Zsa, particularly when the two of them were so different in spirit and temperament, and that irritation laid the groundwork for a story Eva delighted in telling about herself.