(GREGORY WILLIAM MANK, JAMES T COUGHLIN, DWIGHT D FRYE; 320 pages; LUMINARY PRESS/MIDNIGHT MARQUEE PRESS; 1997)
I grew up watching (and loving) the Universal Monsters movies; a very vivid memory was seeing ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEETS FRANKENSTEIN (sort of a 1948 Monsters-adjacent free-for-all with Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Junior and Glenn Strange co-starring with Bud and Lou) on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t such a big leap to THE WOLFMAN, THE MUMMY, THE INVISIBLE MAN and the dynamic duo that launched Universal’s monster franchise, DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN. Then, of course, there were the numerous sequels. Many of those films featured a manic young man named Dwight Frye; I was fascinated by Dwight’s characters and he became an instant favorite. Why? Was it the four-note laugh that his DRACULA character, Renfield, used to chill the marrow? Was it the fact that my favorite band, Alice Cooper, featured a six-and-a-half minute tune on their third album, LOVE IT TO DEATH, called “Ballad of Dwight Fry?” (Fry, by the way, was Dwight Frye’s real name… the “e” was added by Dwight early in his acting career to give it a more continental, distinguished flair.) Whatever the reason, Dwight Frye became “The Man” for me, at least as far as horror movies were concerned. I didn’t know anything about the man himself and found that there wasn’t really a lot of information out there about him (this was the pre-internet, “dinosaurs-still-roamed-the-Earth” late 1960s and early 1970s). The fascination waned, as it is wont to do, and I moved on to other things. Oh, I still watched DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN and the rest any chance I got and Dwight’s Renfield and Fritz were still fun to watch. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I heard about a book co-written by Dwight’s son, Dwight David, that my interest was once again piqued. And so, I started haunting (pun fully intended) various book stores and other venues for a copy… with no luck! It wasn’t until very recently that – after watching DRACULA for, maybe, the millionth time that I renewed my quest to acquire DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH. Things have become so much easier now, with search engines like Google and a website called ThriftBooks to find those hard to find items. So, now, thanks to that very same ThriftBooks, I have my very own copy of DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH. Was it worth the wait, the time and trouble to hunt down? Absolutely!
To call the book exhaustive is sorta like saying that there’s some water in the Pacific Ocean. The second book review I ever wrote was a critique of Fred Kaplan’s THE SINGULAR MARK TWAIN, a 655 page biography with an additional 70 pages of notes and explanations of the main body of work. I was not a fan! The same cannot be said of DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH; it is filled with minutia, but it’s presented in such a way that you really don’t mind. The biography portion of the book ends with Chapter 10 (even though Frye dies in Chapter 8). Those eight chapters are chock full of minutia regarding Dwight’s early life, his stage career – from stock productions in Denver, Spokane, Seattle and Pittsfield, among other towns and cities with theaters (the most common form of entertainment in the 1910s and ‘20s, just about every small city or medium-sized town had one) to his successes on Broadway – where he met Laura (using the stage name Laurette) Bullivant, whom he would marry. Chapter Five, titled “Dreams To Nightmares: The Horror Classics of 1931,” begins the chronicle of Frye’s career in the relatively new film industry and his eventual downfall. As Renfield in DRACULA and Fritz in FRANKENSTEIN, his over-the-top, rather psychotic performances led to Dwight being typecast as lunatics, with hunchbacks and wild eyes. Soon, he found himself relegated to bit parts (often uncredited) in a variety of B movies of varying quality. No matter how small the role, Dwight threw himself into the character as if his part was the most important. FRANKENSTEIN director James Whale was so taken with his portrayal of the sadistic, hunchbacked dwarf, Fritz, that in later years, he reached out to Frye, offering him roles in nearly every movie he worked on throughout the actor’s lean years in the ‘30s and ‘40s up to Dwight’s death in 1943; For THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Whale famously combined three separate roles into one for his to-to ghoul; the actor delivered a tour-de-force performance as Karl, another in a string of hunchback dwarfs.
Between DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, Dwight portrayed Wilmer Cook in the first film version of THE MALTESE FALCON, a grittier, pre-Code offering that wasn’t as pretty as the 1941 version with Humphrey Bogart; when Warner Brothers tried to re-release the flick in 1935, the request was denied by the office of the Motion Picture Production Code for “lewd content.” It may have been Dwight’s last big role in which he wasn’t typecast as some sort of twisted, maniacal, deviant toady for whatever the Monster-du-jour was for a particular film (the vampire, Count Dracula, or the man-who-would-be -God, Henry Frankenstein). DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH mentions numerous occasions where the studio would severely edit or completely cut the actor’s performances. As he struggled to provide for his family, he took on any role offered, no matter how small (or how ludicrous). Dwight Frye was the consummate actor, but first and foremost, he was the consummate family man.
By the fall of 1943, Dwight Frye had been working an overnight shift at Douglas Aircraft (it was his way of contributing to the war effort, as he was too old to serve) for a year or more, looking for movie roles during the day. He had heard about a new movie being produced by 20th Century-Fox called WILSON, a biography of President Woodrow Wilson. With the help of a friend at the studio, he tested for and was given a fairly important, meaty role in the film, Secretary of War Newton D Baker. To celebrate the part, Dwight took Laura and their son, Dwight David, to a double feature. After the movie, the family caught a bus; before the bus even pulled away from the curb, the actor had collapsed in the aisle. He died about an hour later, at 11:15, of coronary thrombosis.
Chapter 9, titled “Milestones,” highlights turning points (mostly deaths) in the lives of the people in the life of Dwight Iliff Frye, everyone from Tod Browning to Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and James Whale to Boris Karloff. “Immortality” called in Chapter 10, as the authors recount the efforts of – not only Dwight’s son, Buddy (his father’s nickname for Dwight David) – but leading members of fandom like Warren Publishing’s James Warren and Forrest J Ackerman, publisher and editor, respectively, of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND (as well as the comic magazines CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA), who invited Dwight David, Sara Karloff (Boris’ daughter), Ron Chaney (grandson of Lon Chaney Junior) and Bela Lugosi Junior as guests of honor to the 1993 Famous Monsters Convention. The chapter ends with the death of Dwight David Frye on March 27, 2003. Until that time, he worked tirelessly to keep the memory of his father alive to new generations of fans.
The actual biography of Dwight Frye – including a lot of great pictures and a couple of pages of notes – ends on page 202. The remainder of the book’s 320 pages features four appendices listing all of Dwight’s acting credits (“Filmography,” 60 pages with production information, cast and notes regarding Frye’s work; “Early Theatre Work: Stock, Vaudeville, Repetory,” 20 pages with much of the same information as Appendix A; “Broadway Plays,” 20 pages of his work there; “Regional Theatre,” 8 pages, including his last role, reprising Renfield in a stage production of DRACULA) and more photos. A bibliography and biographies of the authors make up the last few pages.
