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Finally, the article reached print under the title (rather too sensational for my tastes) “Max Castle, Maker of Likable Monsters: Rediscovering a Forgotten Master of the Fast-Film Trade.”

The piece brought me a small flood of enthusiastic mail, the most dramatic indication I'd yet received of Castle's new following. The response wasn't all encouraging. A sizable part of it came from college students, some of the letters so inarticulate I wondered how their authors could possibly have understood what I wrote. Very likely they
didn't; they were simply Castle fans whose mindless infatuation glowed on the page. His movies I was told again and again were “incredible” and “fantastic.” One freshman from Columbia told me he was now “tripping out” on Count Lazarus regularly every Saturday at the Charles, a run-down old movie house on Avenue B that specialized in midnight movies. He went on to tell me all about his absolutely most favorite flick of all!
Venetian Magenta.
Had I seen it? I really, really should. Because it was very, very groovy.

Mail like this worried me. Its minimal literacy made me fear for the audience I might be cultivating. Fortunately, there were also a number of flattering responses from scholarly peers and critics. But there were two letters that mattered more than all the rest.

The first was from Arlene Fleischer, the film archivist at the Museum of Modern Art. She was toying with the idea of holding a Max Castle retrospective in the coming year. Would I be willing to discuss a brochure and filmography for the event, and perhaps offer some lectures? The invitation was dazzling enough; but more exciting still, she went on to note that the archives were in the process of purchasing all the Castle films they could find, and these now included prints of some of his early German films, which had been located in the Vienna School of Cinema, as well as in several private collections. The search had also turned up a few more B-films to which Castle might have contributed. Would I care to come to New York and look over the material? The archives would pay my travel and accommodations.

It was a windfall. I leapt at the offer.

The second letter was a postcard, a curt one-liner. It said “Congratulations, lover … couldn't have done better myself. As ever, Clare.” Even MOMA's invitation paled in importance for me beside that single terse compliment.

But if I expected Clare's note to introduce Phase Two of our disjunctive love affair, I was dead wrong. When I got to New York that summer to make plans for the Castle retro, she treated me to a month of carefully contrived elusiveness. Calling her from my hotel the moment I arrived, I received a hasty, last-minute goodbye. Clare was on her way out the door and off to Europe. There followed three weeks during which she toured film festivals and conference-hopped her way from Edinburgh to Athens. When she got back, my calls to her home and office went unanswered. I sent letters; twice they produced phone messages in my box at the Granada telling me please
to try again. I got the point. This wasn't the way a prospective lover greets a prospective lover. So I quietly lowered my expectations and soldiered on with my duties at the museum, screening and annotating the films of Max Castle.

My work put me in daily touch with Arlene Fleischer, a hard-edged but always courteous lady who ran the archives with the precision and authority of a ship's captain. One day when she dropped by to check on my progress, I asked, “How did you happen to start collecting Castles?”

“Clarissa Swann,” was her answer. “We were discussing acquisitions over lunch some time last summer. Clarissa is the only critic in town whose recommendations I'd spend money on. I was trying at the time to decide between some Renoirs and some Pabsts that were being offered. To my surprise, Clarissa advised that I buy Castle instead of either. To tell you the truth, I thought she meant
William
Castle, you know, the man with all the awful gimmicks. When she said
Max
Castle, I pretty much drew a blank. After all, this was before your excellent article appeared in the
Times.
All I could associate with
that
Castle was vampires. As it turned out Clarissa had compiled a list of available Castle material. Most of what we purchased from private collections are items she'd scouted out, often in very unlikely places. She put me on to one collector, a certain Hermann Von Schachter in Paraguay. I do believe the man was some kind of runaway Nazi. But he did own a couple of Castle's silent films. That's where we found
The Dreaming Eyes.
Clarissa was also the one who clued me into the fact that Castle and Maurice Roche were one and the same. That's how we picked up the five Roche films we have. So you see, I could have bought Renoirs, and instead I bought Castles. I didn't realize Clarissa was such a fan of his.”

“I don't think she is,” I replied. “In fact, I think she rather despises him.”

“Oh? I wouldn't have guessed it to see how she went after the films once they began to arrive.”

“She watched these movies?”

“Oh yes, every single one, some of them several times over. With that look of hers, you know—when she really cares about a movie. She watches it as if she might burn a hole through the screen.”

“Did she make any comments?”

Arlene thought back. “Now that you ask, nothing really memorable.
Just noncommittal little remarks like ‘interesting.' But I assume she found the films worth serious attention. It was her idea to do the retrospective.”

“Oh, was it?”

“Yes, but when I invited her to organize it, she put me on to you. So here you are.” She smiled rather too condescendingly, as if it should be gratification enough for the likes of me to play second fiddle to Clarissa Swann.

Two days before I was scheduled to return to California, I discovered a letter in my box at the hotel. Clare's handwriting. I opened it at once. It contained the usual brief communiqué.

Jonny My Dear,

If you can spare the time to drop by this coming Thursday evening, I may be able to offer you the thrill of a lifetime. Say about ninethirtyish … ? (No false promises. All the thrills will happen in the dining room, not the boudoir. Okay?)
Clare

“This coming Thursday” was tomorrow, just twenty-four hours before I. had to leave town. Had she planned it that way? Of course I'd go. But from what I knew of Clare's cooking, I couldn't imagine what sort of thrill she might be serving up in the dining room. Nine-thirty sounded like dessert time. Clare was quite lavish about desserts. But I was sure she had more than that in mind.

She did. The evening's entertainment announced itself before I'd knocked at the door of the smallish flat she was renting in the West Sixties. A laugh as vast and almost as menacing as a lion's roar penetrated to the hallway. It was vaguely familiar but I couldn't pin a face to it. Then the door opened and the voice attached to the laugh came at me like a baritone avalanche. And I knew at once.

Clare escorted me into a dining room that displayed the messy ruins of a massive Chinese take-out dinner. There was a couple at the table. Clare introduced them first. The Ferrers, Matthew and Barbara. Their accent identified them as English, their dress and manner as rich. The guest of honor needed no introduction. Seated at the head of the table in a blue-gray cloud of his own cigar smoke, Orson Welles looked like a human volcano flirting with the possibility of eruption. Taking my hand in a tight, meaty grip, he grunted a “hello” that managed to be friendly and at the same time haughty.
He was sporting a black dagger beard and hair down to his jowls. His brow was knotted into a permanent frown that made even his smile seem slightly menacing. Already well advanced toward a Falstaffian corpulence, he took up the place of two at his end of the room. Clare, still earning at a subluxury level in cruelly expensive New York, had no air-conditioning to offer her guests that sultry night other than open windows that admitted the roar of Broadway several floors below. Orson, registering the heat of the evening in a sheen of sweat at the brow, the lip, the cheek, was peeled down to a see-through white caftan and bare feet. The robe clung to his chest, revealing masses of hair and nipples large as eggs. His dishabille suggested he was a houseguest. Was he? Clare, seated next to the great man, was lavishing much attention on him. How interesting. Her love life in the big city seemed to have taken on status.

Orson had been talking when I entered. After our brief introduction, he resumed—and held the floor for pretty much the remainder of the evening, with little more time allotted to the rest of us than he needed to catch his breath, swig some drink, or drag on a Havana the size of a baseball bat. Even then, his labored respiration, blown like a whale's spouting from gaping nostrils, was portentous enough to dominate the brief intervals he left for others to speak. The others didn't mind, certainly not the Ferrers. Quiet and courteous, they contributed almost nothing to the evening's talk except polite laughter or an occasional sedate grunt of approval. They were, I gathered, part of Orson's international entourage, possibly patrons of his art who happened to be passing through. Everything about them said money. Accordingly, they were there to be amused and Orson was more than eager to oblige with a veritable raconteurial cornucopia.

My entrance had interrupted an anecdote about the king of Morocco. Orson had been filming in Morocco. Orson, it seemed, had been filming everywhere. He never got back to his story. Nobody cared. He went on to another and another. Stories about movies, plays, parties, intrigues, famous people, scandalous love affairs. It was a glittering performance; you could have sold tickets to hear it. It lasted through coffee, cognac, two servings of Clare's rum-soaked crepes (three for Orson) before, much to my surprise, the talk circled around to me. I have no idea how we got there; as he downed more cognac, Orson's perorations were growing too baroque to follow. At one point, he was going on about dining on camel steaks in Egypt; the next thing I knew, he was paying me what sounded like a well-rehearsed
compliment. (But then, everything Orson said sounded well-rehearsed.)

“… and what our young friend from California here has done for Max Castle shines like a beacon of hope for all of us who know our work, our poor contribution to civilization depends upon rediscovery in some safe haven of the future when the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism have been laid to rest.” He raised his glass to propose the fourth or fifth toast since I'd arrived. “To the scholars, who are the final arbiters of taste.” But then, turning to Clare at his side, “Of course there are a few critics—not many, a few—who also qualify as intelligent life in the universe.” He rumbled with laughter as he clasped her to him in a bear hug. Clare nearly vanished into his bulk. “To Clare!” He lifted his glass. “Champion of the underdog.”

I knew what that fond tribute was all about. A couple of prominent critics had recently taken out after Orson, seeking to prove that he hadn't written the screenplay for
Citizen Kane.
Always itching for a good intellectual dustup, Clare had at once sprung to Orson's defense with her usual scorched-earth savagery.

After favoring Clare with a rough nuzzle, Orson, as I hoped he would, turned back to me. “Max was the first of us, you know. Mendicant filmmakers begging our way round the world hat in hand, trying to salvage a few small grains of art from the commercial slag heap. When I first met Max, I felt heartbroken for him. And not a little guilt-stricken. After all, I was the golden boy. And here he was, old and broken and hard up. Not really that old, come to think of it. What would he have been? Early forties at most. He got an even earlier start than I did. The
Wunderknabe
of German cinema. But he looked old as Methuselah and beaten down. A life booked into the theater of disaster. He was carrying a dozen movies in his head, all in bits and pieces, scattered around the world—and none of them likely to get finished.

“I couldn't imagine ever coming to such a pass. Ha! Ten years farther down the road and I was following in his footsteps—a gypsy artist with a ragbag of scripts and treatments and unedited footage on my back, surviving on the generosity of people like Matthew and Barbara here, the last of the great patrons. If any of the four or five films I'm juggling ever gets made, it will be thanks to their unflagging faith and loyalty. To Matthew!” He drank off what was left in his glass at a swallow. Clare filled it in time for the next toast. “And to Barbara!” When the booze had hit bottom and bounced back with a giant-sized
hiccup, he continued. “So you see, I hope one day I'll be lucky enough to have a Jonathan Gates to come to my probably posthumous defense, someone who cares enough to salvage the surviving scraps of my labor and see them for what they might have been.” And so there was a toast for me.

While he swallowed, I took advantage of the opening. “Zip Lipsky … ” I began.

“Zip! Brilliant fellow,” Orson intruded to tell me. “I always hoped to work with him. A natural. Tried to get him for two or three of my films. It's a tragedy how he was persecuted by the blacklisters.”

I waited to see if there would be a toast for Zip. There was. When it was drunk off, I went on. “Zip told me Castle was the first person you looked up in Hollywood when you arrived.”

“Not quite,” Orson corrected. “It was Max who looked me up. He had work to offer me. Unpaid work, which was the only kind he was in a position to hand out. Did you know I made my screen debut in a Max Castle movie?” When he saw how puzzled everyone at the table was, he burst into a rumbling great laugh. “It had to be a secret at the time, because of my contract with RKO. But that was a million years ago.” He took a deep drag on the Havana and settled into the story. “Max was making one of his vampire flicks at the time. I forget the title. This would've been 1939—early 1939. John Abbott was playing the lead. British actor. Competent, not gifted.”