The
Strange
The Legend
of Dwight Frye
When I was a teenager in the late 70's, I used
to listen to an Alice Cooper song entitled "The Ballad of
Dwight Fry". Alice, having spelled the name wrong, had
written and recorded a song about the horror actor, Dwight
Frye, who is best known for playing the part of Renfield in
the 1931 Universal production of Dracula. In the song,
Dwight Frye goes insane and is committed to a sanitarium for
at least 14 days. "I was there for 14 days but I was not
all alone. I made friends with a lot of people in the danger
zone." (Alice
Cooper)
I was surprised
to find out that there is precious little information about
Dwight Frye on the internet but in my search I found the
only authority on Dwight Frye in the western half of the
United States, a person known as Sister Grimm,
and I drilled her for as much information as I could get.
The first thing I
wanted to know about Dwight Frye was if he actually did go
insane. Below
(in green) is an excerpt
from the email she sent me:
"The actual song
title is "Ballad of Dwight
Fry", not
"Frye." I would guess that Vince (Alice Cooper) might
have used that spelling as
a hedge against a
possible lawsuit, not realizing that Dwight Frye died in
1944, and his
son, Dwight D. Frye (currently residing in NY) has always
said
of the song that
he "couldn't make out the words."
At any
rate, Dwight worked frequently in films, on Broadway, and in
regional tours of
plays until his death, and although his parts may not have
been large,
publicized, or even credited in many instances, I don't see
any
gaps in his
career that would lend themselves to any extended periods of
institutionalization.
Also, as an ardent Christian Scientist, he would not
have participated
in a voluntary commitment, and no legal records exist that
suggest
involuntary commitment.
I've always felt that Vince (Alice Cooper) was
very taken by Dwight's portrayal of
Renfield in
DRACULA - it was an extraordinary, high-energy portrayal --
and
named the song in
homage to the creator of the character. The only
anecdote
I recall seeing
in relation to the recording of the song was the story that,
in the studio,
Vince (Alice
Cooper) had a
pile of folding chairs stacked on top of him, to
provide him with
restraint comparable to that of a strait jacket to struggle
against for the
spoken "Let me out of here" passages."
It sounds strange but
I was a little disappointed that Dwight Frye did not go
insane. I still wanted to do an article on the actor,
so I questioned Sister Grimm further
to find out if there was anything particularly strange about
him or his career. Below is an excerpt from the second
email she sent:
"There was, to my
knowledge, only one thing that set him apart from the rest
of his
contemporaries and hindered him from achieving greater fame
in his
lifetime:
he was one of the first "Method" actors, decades before
Stanislavsky
first described his "method" of creating characters on
stage.
"Technical"
acting, which existed before the method was devised meant
that
actors
"demonstrated" their character's emotions. There was a
whole
repertory of
gestures that audiences could interpret as emotions:
clutching
your breast to
denote shock, holding the back of your hand against your
forehead showed
dismay, etc. It was like "show and tell." In
Method, you
draw from your
own emotions. Not everyone hollers when they are angry
--
some people
become very quiet, and it is only when you listen closely to
what they say
that you discover their anger. So instead of an
audience
being told "he's
angry," they learn it themselves. Dwight did a
play
called "A Man's
Man." It was tremendously successful on Broadway, and
he
toured in several
revivals of it in regional theaters (in fact, it was this
play that exposed
him to Tod Browning, who later cast him in DRACULA).
In
one scene, his
character fights another character off-stage, and is badly
beaten, though he
doesn't admit his defeat when he returns to his wife on
stage. A
technical actor would have stood in the wings and changed
into a
dirt-dusted
jacket and mussed his hair. Dwight actually had a
small sandbox
off stage, and he
flung himself into it to get into the proper spirit of the
struggle.
The cast thought him quite odd, and the stage crew
considered him
a complete fool,
giving him a very hard time because of it. I think
that's
what hindered
Dwight Frye's career: no matter how small the parts
were,
he'd get into
character when he was on the set -- if his character was a
flighty lunatic
like Renfield or a twisted hunchback like Fritz, or a
half-wit like
Hermann in VAMPIRE BAT, then obviously the other actors
weren't fond of
hanging out with him. Nowadays, you always hear of
actors
on film sets who
"stay in character" between scenes, but in those days, no
one had heard of
it, and everyone thought it bizarre. On Broadway in
the
1920's, Dwight
was considered one of the top ten actors in NY by the Times'
drama
critics. In Hollywood, his career dwindled away until
he was
appearing
unaccredited in films starring the same actors who were
extras in
Broadway shows he
starred in.
Anyway, that's the only strangeness I can think of about
Dwight
Frye. That,
and the fact that he played radio operators in 4 different
films."
There are a very
few people who are currently perpetuating the career of
Dwight Frye. One of them is Sister Grimm.
Another is Dwight Frye Jr. Who lives in NY and
occasionally appears on radio shows and at horror film
festivals.
I have offered to
help Sister
Grimm build
an entire web site devoted to Dwight Frye. So with any
luck, you'll be able to come back to this page and click on
a link that will take you to a place where you can learn all
you wanted to know about Dwight Frye and his
career. So please bookmark this page and come back
soon! But for now, Sister grim is available to answer
any questions you might have regarding Dwight
Frye. UPDATE: I
have not heard from Sister Grimm in over 25 years. I
suspect that she is still alive because she wasn't much
older than me at the time that I penned this
article. (1996) Her website:
sistergrimm.com vanished at least 25 years ago. I
did go on to help build the original Dwight Frye website
along with one of his surviving descendants but it too,
vanished many years ago. However, I have found a
really good section of classic-monsters.com
dedicated to Dwight Frye here.
By John McMahon, webmaster@thestrangedotcom.com
