That scary guy is here again,\u201d security guard Edna Turner informed me as I returned to the newspaper building from an assignment. \u201cI sent him on along to your office. Said he knows the way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Price (1911-1993) was a near-constant presence at the metropolitan area\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cThe Whales of August\u201d to the embarrassment of Jeff Burr\u2019s crass and exploitative \u201cThe Offspring\u201d). A distinguished career culminated in 1990 with a somber, fleeting appearance in Tim Burton\u2019s \u201cEdward Scissorhands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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, \u201cAnd the Villains Still Pursue Me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPrice, eh?\u201d he asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYessir,\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEver trace your family tree? Back to West Virginia, maybe?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cUh, yessir, Mr. Price.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAny particular ancestors?\u201d he asked. \u201cA planter and military man named Sterling Price, perhaps?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The name registered, sure enough. Gen. Sterling Price had turned up in a genealogical search conducted by a great-great-aunt of mine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy, yes, sir!\u201d I answered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, then, shake hands, Cousin!\u201d said Vincent Price with a grand theatrical gesture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re him!\u201d she shouted. \u201cDon\u2019t try to deny it!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy, madame, I\u2019m certain I haven\u2019t the least idea of…,\u201d Vincent replied.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re that guy! That scary guy!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, come, now, madame,\u201d he said. \u201cDo I look all that scary, now?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
She finally came to the point: \u201cDon\u2019t think I don\u2019t know! You\u2019re that scary-movie guy! Hold on \u2014 I\u2019ll think of the name…\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, if I can be of any assistance, now…,\u201d Vincent said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She wanted no coaching: \u201cWell? Why don\u2019t you just come right on out and admit that you\u2019re Boris Karloff!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, ma\u2019am, I assure you, that gentleman has been gone from this mortal coil since 1969.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, then,\u201d she said, \u201cwho the hell are you?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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: \u201cToo bad. She left before I could tell her I was Christopher Lee.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Vincent reserved the right to indignant moments of his own, for that matter, as a gray eminence of Hollywood\u2019s 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 \u2014 a touring engagement for his \u201cVillains\u201d stage presentation \u2014 he was asked what he thought of David Cronenberg\u2019s then-new version of \u201cThe Fly,\u201d whose original filming had been a hit for Price (a rare good-guy role) in 1959.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHaven\u2019t seen it, don\u2019t intend to do so,\u201d Vincent replied. \u201cHmph! You\u2019d think we hadn\u2019t done it right the first time.\u201d I recalled that edgy riposte as a memorial nod in 2007, when Francis Lawrence\u2019s remake of a 1964 Price-starrer called \u201cThe Last Man on Earth\u201d appeared as a vehicle for Will Smith under the title \u201cI Am Legend.\u201d Richard Matheson\u2019s 1954 novel, I Am Legend, has been filmed three times, now. A 1971 remake, \u201cThe Omega Man,\u201d features Price\u2019s friend Charlton Heston in the equivalent role.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That last TCU-campus visit in 1986 coincided with Price\u2019s involvement in two motion pictures, both issued the following year, that would effectively cap his career: Price considered a compassionate role in \u201cThe Whales of August\u201d to be his valedictory. He dismissed \u201cThe Offspring\u201d (also shown as \u201cFrom a Whisper to a Scream\u201d) as a waste of his artistry: \u201cThe director showed me one script, which I approved, but then substituted a trashier script that I could only find offensive.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. \u201cYou know what a red herring is, of course,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a character who\u2019s too fishy to be caught red-handed.\u201d One of many such gems of wordplay from a fine actor who never took himself too seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Typecast in villainy since 1953\u2019s \u201cHouse of Wax,\u201d Vincent had settled by the 1960s into a productive cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (\u201cHouse of Usher,\u201d \u201cTales of Terror,\u201d and so forth) with director Roger Corman. These coincided with the heroic leading role in \u201cThe Last Man on Earth,\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat one, now \u2014 quite a change of pace,\u201d as Price once recalled \u201cThe Last Man on Earth.\u201d \u201cI had made my mark as a Grand Manner actor \u2014 which is a polite way of saying \u2018a ham\u2019 \u2014 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\u2019d like. So, this \u2018Last Man\u2019 thing allowed me a sympathetic role that also called for some intensity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That scary guy is here again,\u201d security guard Edna Turner informed me as I returned to the newspaper…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":293744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,8067,435,82533,7371,7372,17810,61540,38775,53,13813,147553,358,7453,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-293743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-artist","10":"tag-celebrity","11":"tag-foodie","12":"tag-fort-worth","13":"tag-fortworth","14":"tag-halloween","15":"tag-icon","16":"tag-michael-h-price","17":"tag-movies","18":"tag-people-of-influence","19":"tag-scary","20":"tag-texas","21":"tag-top-story","22":"tag-tx","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-united-states-of-america","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115353653398735757","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}