No Traveler Returns - The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi

by Gary D. Rhodes, Bill Kaffenberger

“Gary Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger have added the final chapter to Bela Lugosi’s career, combining fascinating unknown details of his film and stage activities with post-WWII film history. Superbly researched and written as an engrossing story of an actor’s struggle against professional decline. A must-read!”

– Robert Cremer, author of Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape
(Henry Regnery, 1976).

“Gary Rhodes represents that elusive Gold Standard in narrative research into the full depth and breadth of Bela Lugosi’s complicated career. Rhodes’ devotion to the banishment of myth, and to its replacement with frank and humanizing truth, has provided a wealth of historical storytelling that, in turn, renders the actor’s known body of work all the more fascinating and comprehensible. Just when I catch myself believing I know all there is to be known about Lugosi — along comes Gary Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger with a fresh brace of revelations. The process advances immeasurably in No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi.”

– Michael H. Price, coauthor of the Forgotten Horrors series.

In No Traveler Returns, Bela Lugosi scholar extraordinaire Gary D. Rhodes and Bill
Kaffenberger provide a fascinating time travel journey back to the late 1940s/early 1950s, when Lugosi – largely out of favor in Hollywood – embarked on a Gypsy-like existence of vaudeville, summer stock, and magic shows. While many historians have considered this era a limbo in Lugosi’s career, with precious few facts unearthed, Rhodes and Kaffenberger take the reader along for a wide-eyed ride as Bela performs in a nightclub so notorious that armed guards keep watch on the roof, dresses as Dracula in a magic show where he and a gorilla (a man in a suit) play football with the guillotined head of a woman (a dummy), and races from one stock engagement to another without ever missing a cue. Never in his American career was Bela so busy, and never did his light shine so brightly as he valiantly troupes to support his family, dominate age and illness, and please his audiences. It’s a fastidiously researched education in the show business world of the time – and a stirring tribute to the charm, brilliance and inexhaustible professionalism of the star who was Dracula.

– Gregory William Mank, author of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The
Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (McFarland, 2009).

“With preeminent Bela Lugosi scholar Rhodes as co-author, and a foreword by 90-something Schnitzer, who worked with Lugosi at Monogram Studios during the 1940s, No Traveler Returns is a valuable history lesson. For decades it’s been said that Bela was unemployable for most of the late 1940s until his death in 1956. This book sets the record straight.
“While Hollywood may have tossed the actor aside, live theater remained an open door for him. Authors Rhodes and Kaffenberger trace Bela’s path through those postwar years up until 1951, when Lugosi was still able to earn a living, appearing not only in revivals of Dracula but in original plays performed in big-city houses. The book in fact derives its title from a same-named play which starred Lugosi in the immediate aftermath of his collapsed Hollywood career. The play was not well received at the time, but it now sounds like the kind of fun thriller that makes Lugosi fans drool.
“With admirable meticulousness, the authors trace every step Bela took during those years. Just about every theater he appeared in, from major venues like the Curran in San Francisco to summer stock productions, is fully documented, complete with original publicity photographs, newspaper clippings, and a wealth of jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes

Genres: Film, Biography

Kindle Edition

First published July 31, 2012

About the author

Gary D. Rhodes is Head of Film & Mass Media at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Lugosi (1997), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (2002), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012) and The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012). Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). Currently he is at work on a history of the American horror film to 1915, as well as a biography of William Fox.

Reviews

[Jon Towlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholar Gary D. Rhodes has spent much of his career debunking myths about classic horror cinema in general and Bela Lugosi’s life and work in particular. He has done this through meticulous research, leaving no stone unturned along the way. This, his latest - and best – book on Lugosi (written with Bill Kaffenberger) is no exception.

No Traveler Returns tackles the popular misconception of Lugosi’s ‘lost years’ between 1945 and 1951, assumed by many to be a low in Lugosi’s career as the once-famous star of Dracula began sliding into unemployment, obscurity and drug addiction. Rhodes and Kaffenberger reveal this not to be the case at all: in fact, Lugosi was crazy busy at this time, touring the country in summer stock and vaudeville, making personal appearances at magic shows, and starring in a number of B pictures, as well as in the classics The Body Snatcher (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) - all of which kept Lugosi’s public profile high.

Far from being the broken-down, ex-bogey man of popular myth, Rhodes and Kaffenberger reveal Lugosi of this period as a hard-working, consummate professional able to carry numerous stock company theatre productions, giving excellent performances and drawing crowds wherever he went. Rhodes and Kaffenberger detail Bela’s touring schedule down to the day, and provide a timeline that astonishes in terms of how busy and full Lugosi’s diary actually was during these years. So what went wrong after 1951? Here Rhodes challenges the usual theories of morphine addiction and Communist Party membership, arguing instead that more complex reasons lay behind Lugosi’s rapid career decline in his last years, most of them to do with the fickleness of show business in an era that was rapidly changing as the spectre of television threatened movies, closed theatres and drove vaudeville virtually out of existence. All of this goes towards restoring to Lugosi the dignity that he deserves.

No Traveler Returns is a wonderful read and you don’t have to be a Lugosi fan to enjoy it. It paints a vivid picture of life on the road for the traveling thespian in the days of spook shows, ‘straw hat’ theatre circuits and barn emporiums. Highly recommended.

[Michael Kocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

An informative look at not only Lugosi as a man and artist but what popular entertainment was during this time. Rhodes carves out a slice of Americana shaped by exploring stock theatre, spook shows, radio, and a new device called television. Lugosi was not in his prime at this point but he definitely was busy entertaining.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Bela Lugosi, but was extremely disappointed in this book. This book is a more scholarly study of Lugosi’s later years after his Hollywood years. It focuses solely on his personal tours and performances in plays. If you’re looking for a more personal look into Lugosi’s later years, this is not the book for you.

[Brian Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and detailed, it was great to hear how kind, friendly and professional Bela was even while his now well known addiction progressed and he was relegated to small stages. I would have liked more biographical info to go along with it, but the book achieved what it set out to do. I was looking forward to the afterward by Bela Jr., but it was so short it hardly seemed worth including.

[William Schumpert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A full review! A highly recommended read!

https://betterbrainsbooks.wordpress.c...

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most fans of Bela Lugosi are familiar with the legendary actor’s triumphs and tragedies. They may be less familiar, though, with those spaces in between, the limbo days where sometimes things went well and sometimes not.
“No Traveler Returns” does fastidious work cataloging the years between Lugosi’s prime and his descent into grade Z schlock. Lots of actors during this period were suffering career reversals, as Hollywood was waning and TV was gaining ground. Lugosi, however, seems to have been especially hard-hit, which makes a certain amount of sense. Since his classic performances were still such a hit with the audiences, rights to those old pictures could be sold to TV stations, or rereleases planned for the theater. That way studios wouldn’t have to shell out beacoup bucks for a new and untried product. The iconic status of Dracula acted as a boon to Lugosi’s legend while hurting his pocket; that he was a profligate spender with expensive tastes didn’t help matters.
Still, he found his niche during this time doing summer stock, personal appearances, and even vaudeville. Mostly his only companion was his much younger wife, Lillian, who contemplated divorcing him many times and finally made good on her promise.
Some of Lugosi’s performances during this period were vintage, showcasing his talents and on occasion even allowing him to demonstrate range. Other times, though, the results were shabby, sometimes downright humiliating.
Buttressing all this good work by the two authors is a pile of ephemera sandwiched between the pages. There’s so much here, in fact, that it feels like a scrapbook handed down by personal relatives of Lugosi, jealously guarded through the generations. This material includes not only rare but some never-before-seen stuff to go with the new interviews by aging fans and actors who remember the actor so well.
It’s a tribute to the man’s outsized person—his charm and grace—that most of the recollections collected herein remain so vivid, even when those doing the recalling are in rest homes and near the end of their own long journeys.
That said, it’s that very fastidious quality that makes the book good rather than great. The endnotes bog it down a bit. I suppose you could ignore them, but the scholarly grace notes, so appreciated in other contexts, detract rather than add here. After all, what kind of family scrapbook features endnotes? Others will likely appreciate what I regarded as a minor irritant appended to an otherwise-perfect product.