Re-Imaginos: Songs nobody knew and stories left undone

By Wallace McBride

There will probably never be a definitive version of Imaginos. There was a time when I would have written off that inconsistency as a bug, but Re-Imaginos — the latest installment in the occasionally on-going saga — suggests that inconsistency might be an essential feature.

Imaginos — both the character and the song cycle — has been lurking in the fringes of pop culture for about 50 years now, brushing up against the likes of Metallica, Academy Award nominee Grayson Hall and Stephen King along the way. The vision of long-time Blue Oyster Cult manager Sandy Pearlman, Imaginos tells the story of an "actor in history" commissioned by alien powers to push mankind toward an apocalyptic confrontation with evil. Think of it as Zelig filtered through H.P. Lovecraft and Joseph Campbell.

"The Soft Doctrines of Immaginos" (as it was originally called) began during Pearlman's college years in the 1960s, and found its first toehold when the psychedelic rock band The Stalk Forest Group abruptly swerved into heavy metal territory in 1971 when it became Blue Oyster Cult. In need of darker themes, Pearlman's stock got an overnight bump in value as his lyrics about occult sciences, satanic bikers and end-of-the-world rock concerts found an immediate home in the band's repertoire.

While Blue Oyster Cult balked at the idea of devoting an entire album to a solitary idea, songs from Pearlman's Imaginos epic leaked into the band's catalog over the coming years. Their 1974 album Secret Treaties served as a backdoor pilot of sorts for the rejected concept album, featuring at least three songs devoted to the as-yet unnamed "Imaginos" character. The liner notes include the cryptic (and unexplained) footnote: 

"Rossignol's curious, albeit simply titled book, 'The Origins of a World War', spoke in terms of 'secret treaties', drawn up between the Ambassadors from Plutonia and Desdinova the foreign minister. These treaties founded a secret science from the stars. Astronomy. The career of evil."

"Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed," was the album's tagline ... which doubled as the secret logline for the entire Imaginos saga. You can hear Grayson Hall pitch Secret Treaties to the masses in the video below.

The band began to resist Pearlman's gravity in 1975, leading to fewer of his lyrics finding their way to Blue Oyster Cult albums. It's difficult to say how many of his later lyrics were related to Imaginos, but it's likely that some of his work (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, I'm looking at you) simply hasn't disclosed its familial relations yet. Pearlman busied himself in the latter half of the decade producing albums for The Clash and The Dictators, and it appeared Imaginos had met his end.

When drummer Albert Bouchard exited the band in 1981, he and Pearlman went to work on an album dedicated exclusively to the Imaginos concept. Pearlman and Bouchard were the central nervous system of BOC, and if anyone could make Imaginos finally happen it would be them, right? Turns out the answer was "sorta." Behind-the-scenes drama saw the album wrestled away from Bouchard, becoming a formal Blue Oyster Cult release in the summer of 1988. Much of his performance was erased, his vocals replaced by other band members and singers. The convoluted process even roped in such talent Robbie Krieger (The Doors), Joe Satriani and Marc Biedermann (Blind Illusion). During its lengthy gestation period the album endured so many overdubs and do-overs that it's almost impossible to trace everybody's contribution. Aldo Nova, for example, is one of the musicians credited as part of "The Guitar Orchestra of the State of Imaginos," but reportedly has no memory of playing on the album.

And it gets weirder. Because Pearlman lacked the time and money to include all of the songs intended for the planned double-album release, many tracks were deleted and the album condensed into a single 55-minute disc. The songs were then shuffled out of order to create a conventional track sequence. The bizarre assembly of non-linear songs was masked by the pretense of being a "random access myth." Chaos had always been central to the events surrounding Imaginos, so grafting chaos to the narrative was a good fit. 

It also had the unintended effect of making Imaginos a deeply interactive experience. Pearlman's already cryptic lyrics became a Gordian Knot of words. Fans worked to not only decipher the meanings of individual songs, but also to assemble the scattered tracks into a whole story. Meanwhile, casual fans rejected Imaginos as not being (or sounding) much like a BOC album, while more serious fans continue to nurse a variety of grudges over its piecemeal, contentious production. For some folks its neither fish nor fowl.

It didn't take long for 1988's Imaginos album to go out of print. Which is tragic, because Pearlman's self-proclaimed "solo album" is one of rock's legitimately occult experiences. Not because of the story's many nods to voodoo, Rosicrucianism, cosmicism and indigenous legends; but because the experience of exploring its songs — for those who are open to it —  is almost numinous. There's probably even a book to be written on how Pearlman's original vision for Blue Oyster Cult predicted the advent of chaos magic a few years later. I had about 2,000 words written at the start of this piece about astral documents, memetics, the evolution of the Necronomicon from fictional plot device to player in numerorous American conspiracy theories, and how all of THAT related to Imaginos ... but I've probably bored you enough with metaphysics. Besides, we're here to talk about Re-Imaginos.

There have been at least three versions of Imaginos released over the years, all of which have conflicting track listings. The first version was the 1988 album, the second a leaked collection of Bouchard's earlier "demos" (actually low-quality recordings of his final tracks, including the deleted songs) and the release last week of Re-Imaginos, which sees Bouchard revisiting these songs in quieter, spookier arrangements he believes are better suited to the material. With Re-Imaginos, Bouchard gleefully tosses more mud into the waters, settling on a song sequence that thumbs its nose at previous attempts at constructing the Imaginos tale into a coherent narrative and breaking those songs down into four movements: Quandry, Sublime, Ghost and Dance. He goes a step further by including a new version of Workshop of the Telescopes, a song from the first BOC album in 1972 that, until recently, was not known to be part of the Imaginos storyline. 

Confused yet? Here's Stephen King to give you a concise explanation of the story, one that doesn't require any prior experience with the music. 

There's quite a bit more taking place on Re-Imaginos than a re-shuffling of the deck. This isn't just an unplugged version of the original recordings; Bouchard fully disassembled the original songs in order to breathe new life into them. Some of the arrangements seem at cross purposes to their original recordings. The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria was maximum strum and drang in the original interation. Guest vocalist Joey Cerisano delivered a performance that would shame Ronnie James Dio, while Satriani and Biederman clash electric guitars throughout. I can't imagine anyone could have predicted Bouchard would ever reimagine this song as a tango (or is it a rumba? Salsa?), replacing the lead guitars (mostly) with violin. And it works. Not just as an indepedent track, but also as a thematic lead-in to The Girl That Love Made Blind, a song both literally and figuratively about dancing ... and time travel, astrology and immortality, all tarted up as a gothic Christmas long song.

The Girl That Love Made Blind was one of the songs that didn't make the final cut on the 1988 album, which was a sin. It was one of the best songs written for that album, and it's one of the best on Re-Imaginos. But the real showstopper on the new album is Astronomy, which might be the definitive version of the song. If you were to conduct a poll about BOC's best tune ... well, (Don't Fear) the Reaper would absolutely win. But, if you were to sequester the fans who could name more than one song by the band and poll those people? I'd bet Astronomy would come out on top. It's proven to be an endlessly flexible song, adapting itself to metal, classical guitar, jam music and whatever that version on the 1988 Imaginos album was. (I LOVE that take, for the record.) The new version features a really interesting, weighty rhythm that that moves like a behemoth. The new arrangement also shows that Bouchard has been paying attention to how other artists (and his old band members) have interpreted Astronomy over the decades, picking and choosing elements to create a song that kind of sounds like all of them while sounding specifically like none of them. Astronomy is a song with a lot of history behind it and Bouchard wisely doesn't ignore that.

And then there's the album's title track. Bouchard comes so close to redeeming what was nobody's favorite song on the original album. (Putting it last on the 1988 version had the added benefit of never having to skip it.) It's not exactly a bad song ... it just never earns its keep. Being the title track for an album like this might make its rent disproportionately high, but nobody ever said life was fair. A title change might benefit this song to a degree, but the real problem is the lyrics, which don't have much to say until the closing act. I'd be interested in hearing what people think about this version of the song, but the original probably wasn't popular enough to provoke any strong feelings in fans one way or another. We're all probably going to be busy fighting among ourselves about Astronomy. 

Les Invisbles improves on the original in just about every way and creates a sense of urgency in its rhythm that was missing from the electronic drone of the original. Gil Blanco County, a song whose placement in the overall sceme of things still baffles me, is a wonderful mishmash 60's folk music, the faux classical guitar styles so beloved of '80s thrash, and surf guitar. None of those things ought to play well together, but they do. There's a subtle sadness to this version of Gil Blanco County that's reminiscent of early BOC, whose lyrics often demanded to know If U Are Ready 2 Rock, but whose melodies suggested you stay home and read Carlos Castaneda instead.

Magna of Illusion might be the only real failure here. The song served as the climax to the 1988 album, but the new take is s little ... shapeless? Structurally, Magna is one of Bouchard's most impressive songs, the prior arrangement gaining strength as it moved from verse to verse, ultimately leaving the listener stranded on a real fucker of an ending ("... and then World War I broke out!") It's easily the most operatic tune on the album, one shunning traditional choruses in favor of ratcheting up the tension as the song unfolds through guitars and spoken-word performances. But the spooky analog version of the song on Re-Imaginos is never given much room to breath, though. It rushes to the finish line and winds up feeling small. 

With Les Invisibles moved to the end of the album, Magna of Illusion doesn't carry the full burden of delivering the story's climax. We still get that downer ending, only this time via a doom-laden march threatening the arrival of whatever is pulling our anti-hero's strings.

Re-Imaginos feels almost miraculous. I still have trouble believing Bouchard was willing to return to this demon haunted project, and that it happened during this off-brand trashbag of a year. Even better, Bouchard didn't create some lazy collection of covers. I'f put the talent appearing on Re-Imaginos up against the 1988 release any day. But it is absolutely not the album I expected — or even wanted — and it feels more satisfying because of that. There's an intimacy to the production that feels like it can fit in your living room ... if you're in the mood for entertaining monsters.

Imaginos is dead. Long live Imaginos.

Happy birthday GRAYSON HALL! (Probably!)

Today would have been the 97th birthday of actress Grayson Hall. Most likely.

Born Shirley H. Grossman in Philadelphia, Hall was notoriously evasive about her age. The Academy-award nominated actress was probably born Sept. 18, 1922, but paperwork filed on her admittance to Cornell University lists a birthday of 1923, according to R.J. Jameson's biography, GRAYSON HALL: A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW. To make things more interesting, her marriage license gives a birth year of 1925. The actress was even rumored to have altered her driver's license in an attempt to knock a few years off her age.

Sept. 18 is the day recognized as her birthday, though, which feels more like an educated guess than anything else ... but that's Grayson Hall for you.

Grayson Hall ain't no snitch, 1964

John Huston's THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA had not screened for the public when actress Grayson Hall sat down for an interview about the film in June, 1964. It had already garnered a certain level of notoriety, though, with rumors circulating that made the Mexican set sound like a tropical orgy. "It seems like a gossiper's dream: Richard Burton is on location with Lolita," one columnist wrote as the film was still in production in 1963.

In the interview below, Hall doesn't appear to be much interested in the whereabouts of Burton's penis during the production of the film. While I don't think she's being entirely honest about the crew's misadventures, it's also not her place to help feed the Gossip Monster that had cast its lewd eye upon her colleagues. When asked about the "scandalous goings-on" in Mexico, you can practically hear her tell the writer to "fuck off."

(Note: Hall would later receive an Academy award nomination for her performance in THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. Watch footage of her at the 1965 ceremony HERE.)

Inside Story 
By BARRY ROBINSON
July 3, 1964

It’s like this. You’re a reporter, an entertainment writer, always on the lookout for interesting people with equally interesting stories for you to put into a thrice weekly column.

In an office a few flights up from the bright lights section of Broadway, there’s a press agent, who writes you a note about a client of his, an actress with the unlikely name of Grayson Hall. Would you like to interview her?

You’re ready to pass up his offer until you note that she has a featured role in “The Night of the Iguana,” film version of Tennessee Williams’ Broadway play of a few seasons back.

Well, you’ve heard all about the hankying and pankying that went on in Mismaloya, Mexico, while the movie was being made. You’ve read the gossip columnists’ reports and the magazine articles about what supposedly happened when John Huston. Ava Gardner, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor. Sue Lyon, Deborah Kerr, Peter Viertel, and Williams found themselves thrown together in a steamy, tropical village for several months.

Aha, you think, here’s your chance to get the inside story on what happened in Mismaloya from someone who was there. So you pick up your pencil and pad and head for Manhattan.

Hate to disappoint you, but about the only thing that happened in Mismaloya was that a movie was made, a movie which received generally good reviews when it premiered Tuesday. It will open in hundreds of theaters in New York and New Jersey on Aug. 6.

So they made a movie that got good notices. Great! But, what really happened? What about all the scandalous goings-on that were supposed to have gone on?

“There weren’t any,” Miss Hall tells you as you scratch the ears of her son’s dog, Thing, named after a character from a Dr. Seuss book.

“Well, there was one thing.” (Aha, you think, this is it, the bare truth.) “One of the reporters — and there seemed to be millions of them — who came down to cover the filming tried to interview Dick Burton over drinks. Well, Burton is one of those people who can drink for hours without showing it. The reporter, unfortunately, wasn’t, and by the time the interview was finished, Dick practically had to carry the poor man home.”

“You see, it was a work situation. We had come there to make a film, and that’s what we did. Of course, we had one of the longest cocktail hours ever. Work finished at about 5:30 and dinner wasn’t served until nine. We couldn’t go back to our rooms and write letters or anything like that because of the insects. The only thing we could do was drink, so we had a three hour plus cocktail hour.”

This was Miss Hall’s first big movie (she co-starred with Meg Myles in the low-budget “Satan in High Heels.”) Until now, Miss Hall’s career has centered around the legitimate stage, both on and off Broadway.

Among her credits are “The Balcony,” Six Characters in Search of an Author” (the Tyrone Guthrie production at the Phoenix), and “Subways Are For Sleeping.”

From the way New York film critics hailed Miss Hall’s performance, she’s virtually assured of a solid film career — if she wants one. The only hitch is she doesn’t. She’ll make movies alright as long as she can continue doing live roles onstage.

How she got her name is a story in itself. She was born Shirley Grossman, changed her name to Shirley Grayson, and married writer Sam Hall, making her Shirley Hall. Deciding that she wasn’t really a Shirley, Miss Hall made one more switch, this time to Grayson Hall. It may sound like a dormitory, but it’s a name few can forget.

Clippings: A 1972 interview with Grayson Hall "superfan"

Show dead, fan club carries on

By Mimi Teichman
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Jan. 24, 1972

Mark Messina is a Superfan.

He is 21 years old and president of the Grayson Hall Official Fan Club.

Grayson Hall?

She is the actress who used to appear in "Dark  Shadows," the television horror soap opera. "Dark Shadows" is no longer on the tube but Grayson Hall's loyal fans, led by Mark Messina, go marching on.

Mark, who lives at 2815 Dalton Avenue, was a fan from the very beginning. He was in the eighth grade at St. Aloysius grade school when "Dark Shadows" began. All through his four years at Southwest High School, Mark missed only four or five episodes. If he couldn't get home in time to see DS, he would watch it in the audio-visual room at school. When he couldn't be either place, he set up a timer with a tape recorder so at least he would have the sound for the show. There wasn't time for dating in those days. Between studies and TV, life was positively full.

The first DS fan club was the Lara Parker Club, started a girl named Paulette from Bronx. It was followed by the Chris Pennock Official Fan Club, the Don Briscoe Fan Club, the David Selby Fan Club, the Hümbert Allen Astredo Fan Club, the Joan Bennett, Alex Stevens, Donna McKechnie, David Hennesy, Jerry Lacy and Louis Edmonds Fan Clubs.

Mark started the Clarice Blackburn Fan Club. It had 30 Or 40 members and was active for about a year. But, lovely and talented as Clarice was, she wasn't interested in show business, so Mark closed down the club. At that time a girl in Pennsylvania was president of Grayson Hall's fan club, but wasn't doing much with it, so Mark decided to seize the moment.

"'I got Grayson's phone number out of the New York telephone book," he said. "I called her up with my heart in my mouth. I told her who I was and asked her if I could start. 'I'd be delighted' were her very words."

Mark and Grayson started communicating by telephone (busy Grayson hates to write letters). She sent Mark a check for $75 to cover the expenses of printing and mailing.

From the other "Dark Shadows" fan clubs Mark got mailing lists and he advertised in their newsletters. As true-blue Grayson fans expressed their interest, Mark worked till wee hours on the first club kit, which contained a biography, a welcoming letter, a membership card, pictures and a newsletter.

The newsletters are nine pages of single-spaced, spicy tidbits about Grayson and other members of the "Dark Shadows" cast.

"My cup runneth over with joy, or THE DAY GRAYSON CAME TO ST. LOUIS!!!! To my it's all the same, and it was just heaven!  ... Grayson eagerly tore open her welcoming present, explaining for the second time that she wasn't one to be dainty with gift wrappings. A large simulated wood-grain box held six ice cream sundaes ... and six different flavors of topping. Grayson exclaimed her thanks, and loaded the heavy box on her husband, who nearly stumbled with the weight."

In addition to the account of Grayson's St. Louis stop on a publicity tour for the "Night of Dark Shadows" movie, the newsletters, which Mark sends out six times a year, contain poems and other artistic efforts of club members, photo offers, reprints from studio pressbooks about the two DS movies.

Recent ones contained features Mark gathered when he visited New York two summers ago, such as a description of the DS set and an interview with the show's hairdresser.

After DS was cancelled by the network, the newsletter contained a plan of action for having it reinstated. Club members were instructed to write letters, circulate petitions, and picket their local stations.

Grayson Hall and Mark Messina.

There was an account of the wedding of a DS cast member in the 1970 fall edition and the newsletters always contain the latest lowdown on what the DS cast is doing. For example:  "Denise Nickerson is doing just about everything! She's in the new movie 'Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' and plays, I think, a blueberry."

"Jerry Lacy has been parading his handsome face around the sets of  'As The World Turns.' He plays Simon Gilbey, a millionaire playboy. He is also in a Hartz Mountain commercial for a flea collar."

The tidbits about Grayson in the newsletters are many. For instance, there was this account of doings in her bedroom: "Chaos is breaking loose in the Hall house right now. The whole point is, the Halls are doing some redecorating. Relax, all the red is staying. Grayson has decided to redo the bedroom. The master bedroom was a pale shade of blue. By now, it should be getting a little livelier. Grayson's having the whole thing covered in a floral fabric. The results should be smashing."

In the historic visit to Grayson's smashing New York apartment, Mark taped hours interviews which he uses in the newsletters as a regular feature.

"What was your first reaction when you saw yourself on screen?
"I threw up."

'What do you think of Melnac (plastic) dinnerware?"
"I've never heard of it."

"Are you a lover of children?"
"Yes, of course."

"What kind of vacuum cleando you have?"
"I have a little round hoover."

"Were you an extremely beautiful child?"
"Apparently, although I never thought so."

Although there is only one member besides Mark in St. Louis, the Grayson Hall Official Fan Club has 250 members throughout the country. Mark feels he knows them all, and says many are the "teeny-bopper type," but there are 15 to 20 adults, including the woman from Minneapolis who sends him Christmas presents and writes about the weather there.

"My club has prospered because there's lots of dedication involved," he said. "A person has to be willing to work. There are some people who start a club and then can't go through with its I'm very hesitant to recommend other clubs in my newsletter because of their lack of stability. Before I'll recommend one I have to review a sample kit.

"A fan is different from a teeny-bopper magazine, which is often inaccurate or sensationalized, because there's one person at the head of the club who is dedicated to telling it like it is about the star. The future of the club is good as long as Grayson's interested."

Grayson used to send him cartons of fan letters, which he answered for her. Because DS is off the air, she no longer gets them.

Mark Messina and Grayson Hall in the lobby of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis.

Mark keeps the letters in a file that is a fan's treasure chest. It contains movie scripts, club member contributions, assorted photos, material for pending newsletters, clippings, etc., all in neatly labeled file jackets. In the back of the drawer are Mark's memories, his library of tapes of "Dark Shadows" and his super-8 movie cartridges.

His other memories, a scrapbook 20 inches high, is a real treat for the "Dark Shadows" fan, but it wouldn't fit in the drawer. There is a section for each character in the show. Most of the clippings are from daytime television magazines and teen mags.

"I began collecting almost immediately after the show began because I was so taken with it," Mark said. "The show has been gone for some time now, and of course I miss it, but I have lots and lots of memories."

Asked what he would do if Grayson retired, he gave a little gasp and replied, "Oh, she'd never do that. It's too much a part of her blood. When she's not working she becomes irritable."

About once a month Mark picks up his telephone and spends a few precious minutes talking to Grayson.

"I don't like to bother her too much because she's always busy, cooking or entertaining or something," Mark said. "I'm very proud of my personal relationship with Grayson. She probably thinks I'm a very dear person to be doing all this. She likes me, I can tell, or she wouldn't have anything to do with me."

Why does a college sophomore who wants to become an interior designer and whose other hobby is flower arranging direct a fan club? Why is the basement room he occupies in a southwest St. Louis house (shared with his mother, father and 13-year-old sister) decorated with horror movie posters?

"Everybody has to have a hobby," Mark says.

(Editor's note: the color images were taken from the defunct "Mr. Juggins" fansite. I'd link to the page, but it appears to have been infected by malware. Search for it at your own peril.)

Sam & Grayson Hall prop up Night of Dark Shadows, 1971

The troubled post-production of NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS has been well documented since its release in 1971. Unhappy with the sprawling, dour epic presented to them by director Dan Curtis, MGM demanded the film be drastically reduced in length. More than 30 minutes were excised during a marathon editing session, bringing the film down to a drive-in theater friendly 94 minutes. Not many people — least of all the creative minds behind NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS — were satisfied by what was eventually shown to audiences that year.

But the movie still had to be promoted. In 1971, screenwriter Sam Hall and actress Grayson Hall made the usual press rounds, desperately trying not to let the words "MGM can go fuck itself" come flying from their mouths. And the neutered version of NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS was not the only issue they had to address. The absence of Barnabas Collins was also an obstacle that needed to be cleared with grace and, in this interview with the St. Louis Dispatch that year, I think they presented the bravest possible front. They've also got some interesting things to say about DARK SHADOWS' reputation as violent camp, even if the reporter can't keep track of her facts.

You can read a transcript of the interview below.

Out of the Shadows for Friday The 13th 
By Mimi Teichman 
The Post-Dispatch Staff 

Aug. 13, 1971

HERE'S A BUMPY-NOSED, red-haired, bony-handed scary-type witch, slinking and cackling around in the middle of summer. Her high cheekbones threaten to break through the skin. Her enormous brown eyes struggle under an overdose of black eyeliner. No doubt about it. It's a witch, stranded in Missouri, where the forces of darkness wage a never-ending battle against the incorrigible goodness of Middle America.

Skeptics might say she's an actress who plays witches, and they might be right, since she travels under the name of Grayson Hall, an actressy name if there ever was one. Where's all the imagination in the Netherworld? If Grayson Hall is all they can come up with for an actresses name, no wonder hanging, drowning, jumping off towers, being pushed off railroad bridges and trampled by horses are the most exciting, inventive ways the spirits can think of to rid the earth of a few more souls. Not that they are bad murder methods — lots of good scream potential there — but they've all been done before.

The witch thinks horror is better than ever. People die in the above ways in "Night of Dark Shadows," a movie that opens in St. Louis, today, Friday, the thirteenth. The witch is in it and she thinks it's terrific. She plays a sinister housekeeper named Carlotta, who remembers the lives of all her prior selves.

IN PREVIOUS theatrical reincarnations, Grayson Hall was Dr. Julia Hoffman, a hematologist-psychiatrist-hypnotist hopelessly in love with Barnabas Collins, the reluctant vampire; Magda, a gypsy witch, and Mrs. Danvers, another 'housekeeper, also sinister. These characters, and actress Grayson Hall, have existed in the demi-monde of "Dark Shadows" for the last three years. "Dark Shadows" was the phenomenally successful television soap opera that added the supernatural to the usual round of pregnancies and auto accidents, thereby creating a following that has developed cult proportions.

When the program was cancelled by the network in March, its fans contented themselves with the knowledge that a second feature film was following the first, “House of Dark Shadows.”

With the serial doomed to the purgatory of cancelled television programs, “Night of Dark Shadows" is the only way the fans can keep track of how things are going with Barnabas, the vampire, Angelique, the mean but beautiful witch, and the others. Except that Barnabas isn't in the new movie.

"There's just so much you can do with a vampire," said Grayson's husband, Sam Hall, who wrote the screenplay and co-authored the daily episodes for the last two years of the series. "He bites. He needs blood. The only thing that made Barnabas interesting was that being a vampire to him was like an awful disease he couldn't control. He felt bad about it. He'd bite a girl whom he loved and then sulk about it for a week. “

SAM HALL has received help in plotting “Dark Shadows" from his 13-year-old son Matthew, who, like many others in his age group, is a devoted fan.

“He used to bring his friends to the studio and say, 'Let me show you where the coffins are,’” Grayson said. Children are ardent fans of horror because they respond well to fantasy, the Halls believe. And when the couple thinks about it, they admit that what they like about horror is the fantasy as well.

"Of course I have to take it deadly seriously when I write it," Hall said. "It may become camp later, but I can't approach it that way or it won't work.

Grayson Hall, who also takes the horror seriously while working, likes the scale of the macabre. "I worked with Tyrone Guthrie, the great British director, and he said something that I thought was very good. 'I don't understand you Americans,' he said. 'You're always trying so hard to recreate reality. If you really want reality go watch a street accident. This is the theater.’”

SAM HALL AGREES. "Somehow you get relief from seeing monsters that you know can't exist," he said. "Our gore is artificial, and not within your life experience. Removing it from the realm of possibility diminishes real fear. Our violence is fundamentally romantic violence. It's all based on oversized passion. Revenge or love or the supernatural motivates the violence, not the fact that someone needs heroin. I was mugged in New York. That's a real, scary experience. Seeing that on the screen would terrify me. The human being overcome by the mechanical, like when a car runs a man down, I find that scary."

But being hanged as a witch? Being trampled by horses? It's no big deal, sir.

"For a horror film to make an impact, it has to be more violent than the things around us. With all the killing and mugging around, that's pretty hard," Hall said.

“When the show was on the air," Grayson said, "people said it was bad for children. I think it was good because it denied death, one of the greatest fears children have. Characters would die and then come back later. I don't think there's anything wrong with postponing the reality of death for children.”

In the world of “Dark Shadows," characters die and return, sometimes in different reincarnations. The show (and the movies) were written using the literary device "parallel time," a kind of world of if, in which all an individual's possibilities are carrying on at one time. That is, if Carlotta hadn't become sinister house-keeper of Collinwood, she might have been a gypsy or a French doctor. All those possibilities are going on somewhere, as well as possibilities in other centuries, which lets the “Dark Shadows” plots travel in time.

IF GRAYSON HALL hadn't liked working on “Dark Shadows" with her husband, and if her husband and son hadn't cared about living in New York as much as they did, she might have moved to California after her performance as a lesbian schoolteacher in John Huston's movie of
Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana" won an Oscar nomination. But she didn't. Not one to be typecast, she followed the part in the Richard Burton, Ava Gardner movie with a role in a Walt Disney feature.  She has also worked in the theater and been in numerous television dramas.

Sam Hall was born in Carrollton, (Ohio), attended Dartmouth and was studying playwriting at Yale Drama School when Grayson was a guest actress there. He has written novels and for other television programs, and was the chief plot strategist for the prime time "Peyton Place" series.

"Doing a movie that has an end is a relief,” Hall said.

“Don't tell the ending," Grayson said, fixing the defenseless mortal screenwriter with a compelling stare that might have been perfected 180 years ago.

Can a 172-year-old vampire find love and happiness?

In 1968, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post spend a week on the New York City sets of DARK SHADOWS. The result was one of the most in-depth pieces written about the show during its prime, though there's still a great deal here that's sure to piss off fans. The tone wanders between wry and condescending, managing to be both honest and spiteful in equal doses. Despite all of this, writer George Fox never really breaks new ground in regards to understanding the appeal of the show. Fox does everyone a disservice by hitting the usual beats found in almost every story written about DARK SHADOWS. Still, it's an interesting read and might still be controversial enough to prompt some discussion more than 40 years after it was originally published.

Note: Following the clues given in the story, it appears Fox was hanging around the DARK SHADOWS studios in May that year. The story was not published until November, around the same time that actor Robert Rodan left the series.

Can a 172-Year-Old Vampire Find Love
and Happiness in a Typical New England Town?
By GEORGE FOX
The Saturday Evening Post
November, 1968

In some ways the situation wasn't unusual for a soap opera. A girl and an older man in the process or eloping had been hurt in an auto accident. However, the condition of the still-unconscious male patient baffled the examining doctors at the hospital. Although he had suffered only a minor head wound and was breathing normally, his veins were almost empty of blood and no heartbeat or pulse could detected. The treatment — massive transfusions — was already under way when the patient's physician and a friend arrived at the emergency ward. "What do you think Will happen to him?" asked the friend in a desperate whisper. "Who can tell?" was the M.D.’s equally tense reply. "After all, no one's ever given massive blood transfusions to a vampire before."

A burst of eerie music is followed by a denture-adhesive commercial, and one more episode of ABC's "continuing suspense drama," Dark Shadows, comes to a cliff-hanging conclusion. "All soaps are basically problem shows," one of the writers says.”'Most deal with issues of tremendous interest to the American housewife. You know, abortion, adultery, adolescent rebellion, drug addiction, stuff like that. Our problem is 'Can Barnabas Collins, a 172-year-old vampire with a guilt complex, find love and happiness in a typical New England town?'"

Seen on ABC at 4 P.M. (E.S.T.) Monday through Friday. Dark Shadows is the top-rated daytime attraction. With females between the ages of 12 and 34. In recent months the show has become something of a national fad. Barnabas Collins board games, posters, Halloween costumes, masks, capes, coloring books and bubble-gum cards are being rushed on the market. One entrepreneur is even preparing Barnabas Collins plastic fangs, adjustable to any juvenile mouth.

Until the character of Barnabas was introduced last year, the program's darkest shadow of all was a cancellation notice lurking in the wings. Surveys made early in 1967 showed that it was being watched in only 2,750,000 homes, as against a whopping 4,480,000 today. The story had originated as a straight "soap" With Gothic trappings — an old dark house on the Maine coast; young governess menaced by unspecified evils, etc. Topping the cast was former movie actress Joan Bennett, the diminutive brunette whose more than 70 film roles had ranged George Arliss' niece in DISRAELI to Elizabeth Taylor's mother in FATHER OF THE BRIDE. "We were really bombing." admits Dan Curtis, the independent producer who packages the show, "so I figured, to hell with it. If I'm going to fail, I’ll at least have a good time. I went wild, tossed in witches and ghosts, you name it. But that vampire made the difference. Two weeks after he came on, the ratings began to climb.”

"That vampire" is, in reality, a 44-year-old Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid, a tall, attractively homely man with a face like a gardening trowel. I first met him in the Dark Shadows studio, a rancid-yellow structure the size of a two-story commercial garage. A warren of cramped dressing rooms and production offices — drenched with antiseptic pale light — fills the top floor. The effect is a little like being trapped in a submarine.

Frid was in full costume: black Inverness cape; long hair plastered down in spiked bangs; tombstone-white skin: large, slightly cruel gray eyes. He was asked if he had any personal theories on why his character had become such a success.

"To be frank, I haven't thought about it much," he said in his somber, dramatic voice. Paradoxically, his off-screen mannerisms — sweeping gestures, eyebrows arching almost to the hairline — are more florid than his acting style. Frid's vampire is restrained almost to the point of rigidity, as if fighting to hold himself back from some dark, nameless act. "There was the fan mail, of course," he went on. "It's up to two thousand letters a week now, mostly from women. They even send me nude pictures of themselves.

"Frid works with a secretary to answer the thousands of letters that pour in each week -- most of them from admiring women."

"I suppose women see Barnabas as a romantic figure because I play him as a lonely, tormented man rather than a Bela Lugosi villain. I bite girls in the neck, but only when my uncontrollable need for blood drives me to It. And I always feel remorseful later. In the story, I was murdered and turned into a vampire by a jealous witch back in 1796. Actually, my main interest is curing my condition. It's even happened occasionally, like the time I was given massive transfusions by mistake. They made me a normal human. Unfortunately, there was a side effect—I actually looked 172 years old. It was either bite girls in the neck again or die of old age …”

The scripts of Dark Shadows are tailored to make Barnabas Collins sympathetic in spite of his more antisocial tendencies. "He does terrible things," says Gordon Russell, one of the writers, "but we always give him a good reason.” An especially vivid example of this philosophy was the demise of the Reverend Mr. Trask. The episode took place during a flashback to the 18th century, detailing the hero's early career as a member of the living dead. The Reverend Mr. Trask, as it happened, was organizing a mass execution of suspected witches at the time. Emerging from his coffin one night. Barnabas learned of the enterprise and immediately denounced it as "superstitious nonsense " (How a man who had been turned a vampire by a witch could be certain the reverend's victims were innocent was never explained.) DARK SHADOWS fans cherish moment when Barnabas trapped the cleric in the basement of an abandoned house and hit him the haughty phrase: "l thought you were a pious hypocrite when I was alive, and I think you're a pious hypocrite now." He then proceeded to wall up Trask in an alcove.

"Dress rehearsal, dress rehearsal," screamed the loudspeaker in Frid's dressing room. "Personally, the success of the show hasn't meant all that much," he said, rising and brushing a spot of talcum powder off the collar of his cape. "l got a raise when I signed a two-year contract, but that's it. The trouble, I guess, is that soaps are rather subterranean. The people you want to impress are working while you're on. Somehow, this sort of thing just isn't real ...”

If Jonathan Frid can't quite come to grips with his offbeat celebrity, it's understandable. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, trained in his craft at London’s Royal Academy and the Yale Drama School, he'd spent nearly two decades as one of the hundreds of New York-based actors who, somehow, just never make it. Respected by other professionals, they fill out the years between Broadway roles in regional theaters, touring with road companies, playing small parts in Shakespeare summer festivals.  "l portrayed so many conspirators m Shakespeare's historical plays that even today my only real political allegiance is to the House of York,” Frid says. To find fame and relative fortune as a vampire in a soap opera, his manner hints, is improbable almost to the point of hallucination.

Jonathon Frid, actress E.J. Peaker and Robert Rodan attend a party for the cast of DARK SHADOWS in 1968.

Descending from the neat, sterile confines of the studio's second floor to the bustling, dusty clutter of the taping area is something of a shock. Because of limited space, sets are crammed in one upon another at unexpected angles. A single step takes you from the huge, murky living room of Collinwood — the house around which most of the action revolves — to a sunlit artist's studio, which in turn borders on an ancient graveyard. Through it all move technicians, wheeling their cameras like robot dance partners. The actors — who put in 9-10-11-hour days —sit in odd corners, memorizing their lines, oblivious of the activity around them. The show even has a late shift — stagehands who labor most of the night to erect the sets for the following day's program. The three-man writing staff works in an apartment about 10 blocks from the studio, struggling to keep the scripts at least two weeks ahead of the taping schedule.

The actors talk a lot about wages and working conditions. Daytime serials, some of winch have kept the same character for 18 years, are the closest thing to real job security an actor can find, although the 13-week option clauses add a certain amount of suspense. The week I watched the show, the action revolved around a Frankenstein-type monster, played by a young, six-foot-six-inch actor named Robert Rodan. The role required him to spend most of his time as an inanimate, stitched-together hulk lying on a lab table. Having just come from a talk with the show's writers, I remarked that they were planning to throw him off a cliff in a few months. He sat bolt upright. "Do I get killed?" he said.

Robert Rodan, Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid.

Other cast members are more casual about their labors. Redheaded Grayson Hall implied that her main reason for staying with the show is professional laziness. A gifted actress with a solid stage-and-screen reputation, she received an Academy Award nomination several years ago for her performance as a Lesbian schoolteacher in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. "I guess I could have gotten more Hollywood work, she said with an easy laugh, "but it meant living out there and going to the parties and everything. Movie people can't separate an actress from her role. To them I'm still the crazy dyke who chased Sue Lyon all over Mexico. Anyway, this show is comfortable and I get to work with my husband, who's one of the writers.

"I play Dr. Julia Hoffman, a kind of female mad scientist. She's one of the few people who know Barnabas is more than a harmless nut who hates sunlight. Actually, I’m in love with him, and I get jealous as hell because he bites young girls in the neck but refuses to bite me. Middle-aged housewives are always sending me letters saying they understand the situation perfectly."

The girl bitten most often Alexandra Moltke. She plays doe-eyed, virginal Victoria Winters, the show's original protagonist. With three more years to go on her five-year contract, boredom has set in. "Victoria is so dumb," she said with an exasperated grimace. "All I do is stand around saying, ‘I don’t understand what's happening.' Jonathan has hypnotized me into eloping with him, tried to cut off my boyfriend's head to stick on that goofy monster they made, even sent me hundreds of years Into the past during a séance. And I still haven't figured out that he may not be quite normal."

To Joan Bennett, who plays the reclusive mistress of Collinwood, the show is obviously a means of semi-retirement. Although still the only performer given "star" billing, she usually appears only twice a week, at her own request. “I hated the job at first," she admitted in her familiar, tartly suspicious tones. "All that getting up early and eating soup in a paper cup for lunch. But now I don’t mind. After all, poor Jonathan does most of the work. Isn't that amazing about him? Some of it has rubbed off on all of us. A month ago I was In the Midwest, narrating a fashion show, and the teeny-boppers just inundated me. I felt positively like a Beatle.”

Many parents forbid small children to watch the program, less because of the violence (gory scenes usually take place off camera) than because of its odd moral ambiguity. Barnabas is universally accepted by kids as the hero. Barnabas is universally accepted by kids as the hero. Some people apparently get nervous when their children identify with a character who bricks up living people in alcoves. This possibility was mentioned to producer Dan Curtis, a husky, ebullient ex-salesman with one of those suntans that must have been initiated in the cradle. He smiled tolerantly. "We have the only show on the air that kids can accept all the way as make-believe,” he said. "If you watch it regularly, you'll see what I mean. Nobody ever really dies. During the flashback to 1795, we killed off just about the whole cast — and as soon as we returned to 1968, there they there again as their own descendants. If we can't do that, we bring 'em back as ghosts or zombies."

"Frid, as Barnabas Collins, goes over a scene just as the day's shooting begins."

Before leaving, I dropped by to say good-bye to Frid. During the four days I'd followed the shooting, he had been in virtually every scene, a feat requiring countless hours of rehearsal and memorization. "The worst part is that I'm a slow study," he said. "You can't always be looking at the TelePrompTer. The audience notices." Although the concept of DARK SHADOWS seems humorous in print, the actors — Frid, in particular — play it in an intense, realistic style. On Monday, after a weekend's rest, he had delivered his lines with energetic authority. By Thursday, the accumulated strain showed in slurred or misread speeches and ill-timed movements.

"I was awful today." he said. "We never retape, no matter how many fluffs the cast makes, not even when scenery falls over. Costs too much."

It was the first time I'd seen him without makeup, and he looked remarkably the same. His face was still pale and haggard, his eyes shadowed. He collapsed into an armchair. The excessively actorish mannerisms had disappeared, and abruptly I found myself talking to a shy, almost self-depreciating man. "This is the only time I really relax," he said, "when I know I'm not on the next day. You asked me earlier what direction I'd like my career to take, and I couldn't give you an answer. Actually I was trying to keep the day's lines straight in my head. Well, I’d like my own repertory company someplace. I've never been all that ambitious, though I enjoy being a big frog in little pond. The biggest kick I ever had as an actor was playing Richard Ill at a college in Pennsylvania. They really liked it, appreciated what I was trying to do. A show like this pays well enough, but— well, you know …”

As I left, I noticed a dozen or so teen-aged girls patiently waiting for Barnabas Collins to appear. I waved to them as I went out the door and, giggling, they waved back.

Grayson Hall in THE BALCONY, 1960

Frank Shaw Stevens, F.M. Kimball, Grayson Hall, Alex Primrose and Al Viola in THE BALCONY.

Grayson Hall made her acting debut in the 1960 production of Jean Genet's THE BALCONY.

Granted, the former Shirley Grossman had been acting professionally for many years before this. But THE BALCONY marked the first appearance of the stage name. By all accounts, the production was a success. THE BALCONY ran for 672 performances at the Circle in the Square theatre in Greenwich Village before closing in December, 1961. It also won three Obie awards that year in the categories of "Best Foreign Play," "Distinguished Performance (Actress)" for Nancy Marchand, and "Sets."

Originally published in 1956 as "Le Balcon," THE BALCONY is made up of nine scenes, the majority of which are set inside the Grand Balcony Bordello. Taking place shortly after a revolution in an unnamed European locale, the bordello's staff and patrons attempt to restore order by posing as the leaders of the fallen city. It's probably funnier than it sounds.

It was Hall's highest profile role to date, and she won quite a bit of notoriety in New York City thanks to its success. Some of her press coverage appeared in ... unlikely places, though. The best read piece was a wire story that focused on her participation in a discussion about THE BALCONY that took place at Memorial Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. The church conducted monthly church-theater symposiums, and in July, 1960, Hall was their featured guest.

"For more than a hour, Miss Hall and some 25 church goers exchanged views about the meaning of the play over glasses of ices tea and cookies," wrote Tom Henshaw, a religious writer for the Associated Press. (I'd argue that this might also be the most amazing sentence ever crafted in the English language.)

Her appearance in THE BALCONY also earned Hall a mention in another weird wire item:

"Ethel Merman's contract with 'Gypsy' gives her the use of a Cadillac limousine. Grayson Hall, who plays the leading role in the off-Broadway hit, 'The Balcony,' hear of the limousine clause; He went to his producer, Ted Mann, and asked: 'Can't I have even a Vespa?"

Yes, the writer of that piece read the name "Grayson Hall" and assumed the actor was a man. Journalism!

Below are a scattering of images, press clippings and other ephemera from that production of THE BALCONY.

Actress Sylvia Miles, producer Lucille Lortel, and Grayson Hall.

Praise for Grayson Hall from Richard Burton

Matt Hall made an interesting discovery while going through the effects of his late father, Sam Hall: A letter from actor Richard Burton to Myrna Loy. Burton appeared opposite Matt Hall's mother, Grayson Hall, in 1964's THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, for which Grayson received an Academy Award nomination for best actress.

"Richard Burton knew Myrna Loy. He wrote her a letter from the set of Iguana in Mexico, extolling the virtues and acting ability of my mother. After Iguana, back in New York, my parents were swept for a period into Myrna Loy’s social circle. She gave them Burton’s letter."

You can read a sample of the letter below. Matt Hall has scanned the complete letter and envelopes, which you can see at his website, Nantucket '73.

SATAN IN HIGH HEELS: The Musical?

Grayson Hall spent the better part of her career denying she appeared in SATAN IN HIGH HEELS, a 1962 sexploitation film starring Meg Myles. You can see photographic evidence to the contrary above. (For the record, Hall is pretty great in the film.)

A few years ago Robbie Robertson developed a stage adaption of the film which has been performed in Columbia, S.C., and New York City. Over the weekend, he announced he's developing a musical version of the stage production and posted six minutes of demo recordings on YouTube. Listen to them below!

The cast of DARK SHADOWS by The Clay Guy

More than a year ago, I shared a few links to DARK SHADOWS-themed sculptures created by a Chicago-based artist calling himself The Clay Guy. Coincidentally, Mr. Guy was one of the vendors present last weekend at MAD MONSTER PARTY, and he brought his friends from Collinsport with him. I snapped some photos of the characters, which were tucked in alongside sculptures of Buffy Summers, Herbert West, Jack Torrence, etc.

If you like his work, you can find him online at www.clayguy.com. Or jump straight to his DARK SHADOWS gallery by clicking HERE.

Grayson Hall in WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS, 1975

In 1975, Grayson Hall appeared in a revival of J. M. Barrie's 1908 four-act play, WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS. There's not much about the play circulating online, save for the essential nuts and bolts: According to the Internet Off-Broadway Database, the show ran for 71 performances, opening May 28 and closing the following month on July 27 in 1975. The show was staged at the Roundabout Stage I in New York City.

Grayson Hall and Fran Brill in WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS.

R.J. Jamison's biography of Hall, A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW, includes a number of reviews of the play (most of them positive) but history suggests the production did little to distinguish itself. Above is a June 1, 1975, item promoting the event from a New York newspaper, showing cast members Hall, Fran Bill and Susan Tabor in costume.

Clippings: Grayson Hall goes OUT OF THE SHADOWS, 1971

OUT OF THE SHADOWS:
A visit with the complicated Miss Grayson Hall
By Edith Efron,
TV Guide, Jan. 23, 1971

The freckle-faced, sharp-featured woman is lampooning Katharine Hepburn recklessly -- stretching her neck like a young giraffe and flinging her arms into the air in satiric anguish. The sedate waiters in a chic new York restaurant stare in astonishment. "Hepburn is an amateur!" she exclaims, amid a running fire of witticisms. "She's always been an amateur."

It is not every soap-opera actress who has the audacity to abuse Katharine Hepburn so roundly, but Grayson Hall, of ABC's Dark Shadows, expects to get away with it. She may be spending her own days as the mysterious Dr. Hoffman -- the one who suffers from unrequited love for a vampire -- but she has one of the classiest acting pasts to be found in the soaps.

Nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the movie version of "The Night of the Iguana," the Philadelphia-born, Cornell-educated actress has had a distinguished stage career as well. She starred in Tyrone Guthrie's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"; in Jess Gregg's "Shout from the Rooftops"; and Jose Quintero's production of Genet's "The Balcony." She's also done TV -- Chrysler Theatre, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as well as Dark Shadows, on which she's been a staple for three years.

One of the directors of Dark Shadows, Henry Kaplan, says this about her acting: "Her talent is astounding. One of her most striking features as an actress is stillness. There's a kind of inner stillness when she's on. All the external stuff goes. She projects through this screen of inner stillness."

The externally wisecracking Grayson, with the "still" inner self, is both awe-inspiring and startling to the younger performers in Dark Shadows. Says Michael Stroka, the friendly neighborhood psychopathic killer in the series: "She's one of the biggest cutups on the set. She's forever clowning, making jokes, wandering around. If you were watching her, you'd never think she was taking anything seriously. And yet, by dress rehearsal somehow it's all there! I don't know how she does it."

All of which is very well ... but what is an Academy Award nominee and an "astounding talent" doing, laying Katharine Hepburn low at lunch, clowning around a soap-opera set, and killing off two years of her creative life by feigning passion for a vampire?

Grayson Hall explains: "I'm no longer ambitious. When you're young, 24, 25, you're committed to a kind of drive. When you get to the point where I am, and have a family ... well, I just love the work. That's all I care about.
 

Grayson Hall is unamused by Bill Murray Richard Burton in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA.

"I have the best of all possible worlds. I'm a wife, a mother, a housewife. And I work when I want to. So I'm fulfilled on all levels."

On level one, Grayson, wife, lives with writer Sam Hall in "a big, old funny apartment" in Manhattan, crammed to the gills with heavy conversation-piece antiques. Biedermeier chairs, a porcelain bidet, gigantic 15th-century Corsican cupids, and grotesque Ming dogs ornament the dark red living room.

Somewhere in the deeps of the apartment, there are roars of laughter. Grayson leads us to the roars -- to the kitchen, where a stout, bald, jovial man sits at a table covered with sheets of paper and scribbles. Husband Sam Hall is a writer of Dark Shadows -- which is written, daily, on Grayson's kitchen table -- and he's in conference with two other writers. Sam, too, has had an unusually distinguished career. He's written for the Theatre Guild, U.S. Steel Hour, Playhouse 90. Why is he churning out stuff about vampires? "If you want to stay in New York today," he says, "all there is is the soaps. Or move to California."

We visit the next level and give Grayson, mother, a whirl. We can't see her in action, because her child, Matthew, is not at home. But Grayson is full of funny talk about her precocious "12-year-old here." Matt, it seems, reprimands Grayson for her excessive comic exaggeration. He recently threatened to "curb her extravagance of language." "You come home from Bloomingdale's and say 'There were 8,000,000 people there.' You know there weren't 8,000,000 people there! You come home from the studio and say 'This was the worst day of my life You know it wasn't the worst day of your life!"

We move on the the last "level," that of Grayson, housewife. She's Domesticity Incarnate, it appears: "I'm a committed cook. Basically I'm a French cook. But I've also taken a course in Chinese cooking and in Mexican cooking. Most recently I've taken Yucatan cooking." Grayson labors three days to turn out an exotic meal for a few friends. Then they talk about it for weeks.

All "levels" have now been displayed and, after a parting flurry of jokes, the brief visit comes to an end.

Can this be the "best of all possible worlds"? Is this domesticated, wisecracking Academy Award nominee and lampooner of Katharine Hepburn "fulfilled," as she says? Unsurprisingly, many think not.

One Dark Shadows colleague says: "She's as neurotic as hell. Some kind of anxiety eats at her. She's a compulsive gossip. There's that compulsive need to be 'on' -- that constant barrage of jokes, and quips, and exaggeration. She's got the talent. She could have a far greater career. I think she knows she hasn't done with herself what she could have. I think frustration eats at her."

On the other hand, some believe it is not quite so "black and white" as all that. Director Henry Kaplan says:

"Actors are very strange people, and Grayson is a strange woman. I certainly think she'd like to be more successful. Even though part of her is fulfilled, she's still reaching out for that part that isn't. But Grayson's family is important and fulfilling to her. It's not a cop-out."

(NOTE: Thanks to Bill Branch for the scans!)

GRAYSON HALL in HAPPY END, 1977

It's been too long since we talked about GRAYSON HALL. So here's a little bit of info about her appearance in the 1977 Broadway play, HAPPY END.

A three-act musical comedy written by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht, HAPPY END debuted in Berlin at the Theater in Schiffbauerdamm in 1929. It closed after seven performances, but the 1977 revival fared quite a bit better, closing in July after 75 performances.

Directed by Robert Kalfin and Patricia Birch, the cast starred CHRISTOPHER LLOYD, MERYL STREEP and GRAYSON HALL, in a role referred to as both "The Fly" and "The Gray Lady." According to R.J. JAMESON's biography of Hall, A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW, the production was fraught with injuries. Lloyd was forced to perform on crutches after taking a fall from the stage, while a mishap during rehearsals left Hall wearing an arm cast early in the production.

The playbill for the 1977 production detailed Hall's career, outlining her recent theater work, the Academy award nomination and a mention of her role opposite one Canadian vampire: "She was featured on the daytime TV series 'Dark Shadows' and has done more films, TV and stage work than there is room in this program to mention."

You can see a video clip of a performance by the cast of HAPPY END from the 1977 Tony Awards HERE.