Lugosi Syndrome with a Happy Ending

After a successful three-month theater festival in the Netherlands,^[1] Anna and I, and our two small daughters, were filled with wonderful memories. We returned to America, our hearts filled with the sunny springtime, the many joyful ovations, and beautiful bike rides through the tulip-fields. We settled down in the small village of Piermont^[2] on the West Shore of the Hudson River, north of New York City.  The Italian-style houses, the narrow winding streets, and the breath-taking views were charming to us.  Piermont is a tiny town where, during World War II, the American Army, in secret, launched a million soldiers from the Piermont pier to fight the European war and to participate in the Normandy Invasion.

In November of 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Communist dictatorship collapsed, and millions of people were free. My legend about The Bloodthirsty Dictator Hayno ends with a long-oppressed peoples’ victory. In the balladeer poet Ivan’s story, the liberation of East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia finally comes. With the small moneys we had earned in Amsterdam, we bought a humble house in Piermont. But whatever cash was left to us was soon depleted. It seemed to me there was no more need for Messengers, neither on the streets, nor on the stages.

     Anna and I decided to put the visions of the Hayno Legend into a screenplay. We created a mythologic movie. We dreamed into the story a Superhero Bike Messenger, who fights the Wolfe-Commandos, sent from the legendary land of the legendary Dictator, in New York’s streets. Anna turned out to be the heroine of the tale; a gutsy, ambitious, American TV reporter, with an irresistible, empathic sense against vampires and tyrants. My shamanic figure would become a young, immigrant Transylvanian priest, and the only survivor of a catastrophic flood, which was sent by Hayno, the Dictator of the Country, to drown the inhabitants. These two characters meet and fall in love. They share the belief and faith that they can end the power of Dictator Hayno forever. Hollywood was interested, but the producer went bankrupt with his current project, and “bailed out” from the negotiation.

A “sensational opportunity” came to me from a place that I wouldn’t have expected. The New York Hungarian Theater was best known by the city’s Hungarian immigrants. Once I was invited there, on the 15th of March, to tell the famous To the Feet, Hungarians poems from Sándor Petőfi, and then to play an elegant gentleman in a comedy. On an early spring day Elisabeth de Charay^[3], the Hungarian Director of the Theater, called me up. She asked me if I would like to talk about a biographic presentation, playing the main role in a reminiscence of Bela Lugosi^[4]. She chose me to bring the horror film star’s legendary life to the stage. We made an appealing title for the show, a really classy name: Vampire in the Mirror.

We started rehearsals. The life of Lugosi had plenty of interesting, dramatic, and humorous elements to please the audience. The organizers were expecting a real success. The promising material was aimed not only at Hungarian audiences, but at English-speaking New Yorkers as well. Lugosi’s controversial intentions made it even more complicated to serve the role. While he was always battling against boxing immigrant actors into their foreignness, he created Dracula in his own spitting image. “From inside of him,” Bela said, “a shutting pain was often killing him.” His psychological state became instable. These “torturous aches” chased him toward narcotic substances like marijuana and even stronger drugs, like opium and heroin. After the successful stage-presentation of Dracula, Lugosi accepted a financially-very-unlucky movie-agreement for the film adaptation. After the movie, Lugosi began a series of theater performances. Where folks remembered such events, a story was told of the director of a smaller venue who, wanting to hurry Lugosi to the stage, entered his hotel room and found our “hero” lying in a coffin, in his pale Dracula visage, with the traditional black robe. Bela responded to the director’s demands with the opening line of a well-known Hungarian chanson: “There comes the End… the End of all of us…”^[5]

“Only one actor would have been able to play the perfect Bela Lugosi,” said de Charay later. “That would have been Ivan.” I experienced a not totally unfamiliar reaction to the role. My body and my soul answered that I wanted to inject Bela Lugosi’s character into myself. First the excruciating torments came in my arms and legs, but then unimaginable back pains started to reach me. My social relations and my psychological state began to suffer. In our home verbal insults and, oftentimes, even abusive expressions left my mouth. Anna tried to understand me, but she couldn’t. Just like Lugosi himself, I vacillated between a desire for success in playing the role and a desire to preserve my own mental and physical health.

In the case of Lugosi, his much younger wife had to divorce him and take their child. Anna and I went in the same direction, though our divorce happened later, when our two daughters finished at university. What would a psychologist (or an exorcist) say, if they could read this scary story about what happened when I accepted the mask of Dracula?

On the 14th of May in 2002, a stroke hit me and paralyzed the left side of my body. This solved many hesitations about the Bela Lugosi performance. Anna had to carry me to the Intensive Care Department of the Nyack Hospital. A heart problem showed up, related to the paralysis, which the doctors immediately diagnosed as a mitral valve prolapse. I was right away sent for a heart operation. I talked later about my whole God-Sent Ordeal with the greatest enthusiasm.

“They are cutting wide your ribs, then they stab your heart, they game six with your shoulder, like for a chicken, dumping in your heart, then they put into your heart some plastic stuff, which was assembled by unknown folks. Then they sew your chest together again.” “You may never meet again with these folks, but you will be thankful for them for your whole life. The only way that you could express your gratitude toward these folks is if you wear smiles on your face in the crowded street, and be thankful for each breath.” I woke up some hours later after the operation, and first saw Anna’s face over me. I was smiling at her from behind the breathing mask, like a clown. Then I asked the nurse to take away the mask and gave Anna a kiss. I asked for a phone, and I called my daughters. When they picked up I sang them, after James Brown (in a scratchy voice) “I feel good, so good, ta-da-da-da-da-da, Papa feels good, so good.” I was glad to hear as Julia was screaming “Dad, that’s you? That’s youuuu?”

By the terms of mid-length article this sounds like a happy ending, but by Ivan’s legendary terms it is a happy beginning. After the operation my left side remained in light palsy. I was lucky, because I didn’t turn into someone who can only express himself with half of his face. Which, truly, isn’t a bad thing. Is it?

After that operation I had a huge change in my life. I was sending my spirit up, striving for Upward. About 120 people have visited me, since, to hear their Legend. I call these meetings The Legend of You.

Ivan and I meet three years ago in Piermont. At that time, he presented his knowledge, The Legend of You, for the interested people. I felt that his kind, courteous, Hungarian-accented talk was close to my childhood memories. At that time, I heard Hungarian talk every day among my parents. On Sundays we all had beef broth and Hungarian chicken papricash for lunch. My Grandmother entertained the children and herself with Hungarian fairytales.

We decided, with Ivan, that we were going on a discovery journey in which we will find my legend, my myth. Interestingly, I wouldn’t find my heroic Helper among the Hungarian folktales, but in a newer version of an old story.

Wonder Woman was the hero of my child’s dream… and, though a good few years have passed, she is still the same.

Ivan asked from me if I remembered when I dreamed about flying up in the Universe.             Indeed I had! And from that came my Upward- ascending trip to THE UP-CONSCIOUS-WORLD. If we have SUB-CONSCIOUS, and UN-CONSCIOUS, . . . we must have an UP-CONSCIOUS as well. This is what we are enjoying with Ivan, and with many others, while we are on Earth, and perhaps longer?

That is how the book was made: Alice in the Upperland

Well, here we are, dear Alice, at the starting point of your greatest adventure, The Legend of You.  Let’s just remind ourselves about that miraculous moment and place where it all started. Was it safe for you? A friendly playground on an idyllic summer afternoon, with the usual noise of parents and children. Around the bubbling water fountain in the park. You were fidgeting with fresh restlessness. Busting out upon the world. It was a scene of invocation for your adventure.