Elaine Stritch and Bela Lugosi, 1947
The aforementioned Liz Smith column Stritchy reference:
I have never forgotten my longtime friend Elaine Stritch’s verdict on Dracula, because before I met her, she was all over the U.S. with Bela Lugosi in person, starring as the ingenue in the play after the original black and white movie hit.
In those days, actors learned their roles by studying half pages of paper called “sides.” I asked Elaine, “What was it like?”
Elaine quipped. “Liz, I had six sides of screams!”
Namedropping so smooth only Liz Smith could get away with it. More on the time Stritchy caroused with Bela Lugosi:
In a 1990 interview with this author, Stritch recalled Lugosi as an actor who took his work seriously, to the point of wearing full costume from the first day of rehearsals. After work, Stritch related, “he’d take us out to knock back a Scotch, and told some wonderful stories. He was a very good actor, you know, but he wasn’t lucky professionally. I remember him telling me, ‘You know, Elaine, if it wasn’t for Boris Karloff I could have had a corner on the horror market.’ “
—David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, 2004
