That scary guy is here again,” security guard Edna Turner informed me as I returned to the newspaper building from an assignment. “I sent him on along to your office. Said he knows the way.”
Vincent Price certainly did know the way: A frequent visitor to Fort Worth during the 1980s, what with his touring dramatic presentations and his fondness for the city’s art museums, the actor and bon vivant routinely visited the Star-Telegram, sometimes with a new film to promote. Vincent and I had discovered a distant-cousins kinship during the 1970s.
Price (1911-1993) was a near-constant presence at the metropolitan area’s home-and-garden shows, cookware trade exhibitions, and art-broker marketplaces. Apart from his horror-movie typecasting, he was known as a chef and cookbook author, a collector of fine paintings (and curator for Sears & Roebuck’s home-decor department), and a stage interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. Such appearances supplemented a late-in-life surge of screen-acting assignments (from the sublimity of Linsday Anderson’s “The Whales of August” to the embarrassment of Jeff Burr’s crass and exploitative “The Offspring”). A distinguished career culminated in 1990 with a somber, fleeting appearance in Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands.”
Vincent Price: The name conjures images as varied as his roles (romantic, comical, heroic, tragic) before typecasting kicked in to distinguish him as the baddest of Hollywood’s boogeymen. Having followed his work since my schoolboy days, I finally met Price in 1974 when assigned an interview in connection with his popular stage show, “And the Villains Still Pursue Me.”
“Price, eh?” he asked.
“Yessir,” I said.
“Ever trace your family tree? Back to West Virginia, maybe?”
“Uh, yessir, Mr. Price.”
“Any particular ancestors?” he asked. “A planter and military man named Sterling Price, perhaps?”
The name registered, sure enough. Gen. Sterling Price had turned up in a genealogical search conducted by a great-great-aunt of mine.
“Why, yes, sir!” I answered.
“Well, then, shake hands, Cousin!” said Vincent Price with a grand theatrical gesture.
We never quite figured out the specific kinship, third- or fourth-cousins or whatever, but we developed a friendship that persisted. On one memorably spontaneous occasion, Vincent and I were touring the Amon Carter Museum when an angry-looking woman approached, point-blank.
“You’re him!” she shouted. “Don’t try to deny it!”
“Why, madame, I’m certain I haven’t the least idea of...,” Vincent replied.
“You’re that guy! That scary guy!”
“Oh, come, now, madame,” he said. “Do I look all that scary, now?”
She finally came to the point: “Don’t think I don’t know! You’re that scary-movie guy! Hold on — I’ll think of the name...”
“Well, if I can be of any assistance, now...,” Vincent said.
She wanted no coaching: “Well? Why don’t you just come right on out and admit that you’re Boris Karloff!”
“No, ma’am, I assure you, that gentleman has been gone from this mortal coil since 1969.”
“Well, then,” she said, “who the hell are you?”
Without waiting for an answer, the woman stalked away in a huff of indignation, leaving Vincent Price and me flabbergasted but hardly at a loss. He chuckled, then said: “Too bad. She left before I could tell her I was Christopher Lee.”
Vincent reserved the right to indignant moments of his own, for that matter, as a gray eminence of Hollywood’s horror-movie scene. He would become riled when reminded of various modern-day remakes of his classic pictures. Upon arriving at Texas Christian University in 1986 — a touring engagement for his “Villains” stage presentation — he was asked what he thought of David Cronenberg’s then-new version of “The Fly,” whose original filming had been a hit for Price (a rare good-guy role) in 1959.
“Haven’t seen it, don’t intend to do so,” Vincent replied. “Hmph! You’d think we hadn’t done it right the first time.” I recalled that edgy riposte as a memorial nod in 2007, when Francis Lawrence’s remake of a 1964 Price-starrer called “The Last Man on Earth” appeared as a vehicle for Will Smith under the title “I Am Legend.” Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend, has been filmed three times, now. A 1971 remake, “The Omega Man,” features Price’s friend Charlton Heston in the equivalent role.
That last TCU-campus visit in 1986 coincided with Price’s involvement in two motion pictures, both issued the following year, that would effectively cap his career: Price considered a compassionate role in “The Whales of August” to be his valedictory. He dismissed “The Offspring” (also shown as “From a Whisper to a Scream”) as a waste of his artistry: “The director showed me one script, which I approved, but then substituted a trashier script that I could only find offensive.”
Vincent also enjoyed his occasional casting as a red herring, a plot-device distraction who appears sneaky enough to divert suspicion from a hidden culprit. “You know what a red herring is, of course,” he said. “That’s a character who’s too fishy to be caught red-handed.” One of many such gems of wordplay from a fine actor who never took himself too seriously.
Typecast in villainy since 1953’s “House of Wax,” Vincent had settled by the 1960s into a productive cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (“House of Usher,” “Tales of Terror,” and so forth) with director Roger Corman. These coincided with the heroic leading role in “The Last Man on Earth,” filmed in Italy. That story finds a lone citizen (Price) immune to a plague that has transformed humankind into bloodthirsty predators. Price delivers a nuanced portrait of a resourceful survivor, struggling as much with a chronic-to-acute threat.
“That one, now — quite a change of pace,” as Price once recalled “The Last Man on Earth.” “I had made my mark as a Grand Manner actor — which is a polite way of saying ‘a ham’ — and a perpetual villain, on top of that. When occasionally I got to play the good guy, the role was usually not as emotionally demanding as I’d like. So, this ‘Last Man’ thing allowed me a sympathetic role that also called for some intensity.”
And of course, Vincent Price did it right the first time. Ironic, too, that such remakes as he professed to despise should wind up calling belated attention to his original versions.
