Ed Wood's Warm Angora Wishes: "Heaven Knows Mr. Wood."

Ed Wood goes to a very specific version of Heaven in this story.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's Warm Angora Wishes and Rubber Octopus Dreams (Arcane Shadows Press, 2024).

The story: "Heaven Knows Mr. Wood" by Dwight Kemper

This is where Ed Wood died.

Synopsis: In December 1978, filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. and his wife Kathy are evicted from their Hollywood apartment and have to move in with a friend of theirs, actor Peter Coe. A few days later, while Peter, Kathy, and some other friends are watching a football game on television, Ed Wood dies of a heart attack in a back bedroom at the age of 54. There's a look of horror on his face. At his memorial service, the famed TV psychic Criswell, a longtime friend of Eddie's, tells Kathy that her late husband will be long-remembered and that God has "a soft spot for artists."

Meanwhile, Ed Wood arrives in Heaven and finds it to be a giant movie soundstage, complete with scenery and microphones. Even St. Peter, who sits at a podium at the Pearly Gates, looks and talks exactly like Bela Lugosi. Eddie is surprised, but not upset, to find himself dressed in the blue gingham dress and ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Cross-dressing is not frowned upon in the afterlife. Peter tells Ed that his movies have brought happiness to many, and so the late director will be allowed to live in paradise. He already has a friend waiting for him at the Old Actors' Cloud.

Eddie ventures along the Yellow Brick Road until he meets the actual Bela Lugosi, who is hanging out with fellow horror icons Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff. They stop to chat. Eddie eventually realizes that his dreams have come true. He is finally a filmmaker with unlimited money and resources, and Bela and the others are set to star in his next opus.

Excerpt: 

Startled, Eddie turned around and found himself in front of a high podium where a bearded man was waiting. Behind him were a pair of gates, the bars of which appeared to be lit by bulbs inside frosted plastic. The floor of the stage was covered with the crawling wisps of dry ice smoke. Ed looked down and saw he was now wearing a  sweater made from the finest angora and a gray skirt and sensible shoes.

Reflections: "Heaven," said Russell Green, "is where the donkey finally catches up with his carrot. Hell is the eternity while he waits for it." I think this old saying applies itself to Ed Wood pretty easily, and it was on my mind as I pondered Eddie's fate in the afterlife. I also thought about a 2013 episode of the web series Precious Plum in which the title character (Elaine Carroll), a child beauty pageant contestant, innocently asks her mother (Josh Ruben) what Heaven is like.

The carrot and the donkey.

"Like Target," replies the mother casually, "but everything's free."

I can sympathize with Plum's mother here. We often have a difficult time envisioning or describing the afterlife because we've obviously never experienced it. Besides, we're so focused on our earthly lives that we can't imagine an existence that's completely divorced from the physical, material world that we know. 

And so, most depictions of Heaven in art and fiction are just fancier versions of Earth. What else do we have to go on? Movies and television shows tell us that, after we die, we'll still look like ourselves, talk like we always have, and think with the same brains we had in life. Multiple writers have come to the conclusion that eternity will eventually grow boring for us, but this presupposes that we'll still have an attention span after we die.

Author Dwight Kemper addresses this problem in his story "Heaven Knows Mr. Wood," in which Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi reunite in the Great Beyond. And what do they do once they're up there? Make movies, of course! It's all they know. Kemper has Lugosi say in his unmistakable accent: "Heaven is vatever you make of it. Ve are all movie stars, so naturally, Heaven, it reflects vat ve know."

Maybe this isn't so bad. I'm a self-confessed game show addict, and one of my great pleasures in life is watching reruns of the '70s edition of Match Game hosted by Gene Rayburn. Every once in a while, I'll remember that Gene and nearly all the celebrity panelists (Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Betty White, Richard Dawson) are dead. On the TV screen, they're still alive and filled with boundless energy. Where did all that energy go? Did it just evaporate into nothing when they died? It comforts me to think that, somewhere, there's a big Match Game reunion going on in Heaven right now.

I felt the same sort of comfort while reading "Heaven Knows Mr. Wood." In this story, Eddie dies broke and homeless, but in Heaven, he finally gets to be the filmmaker he always wanted to be on Earth. In other words, the donkey has finally caught up with his carrot.