Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 276: "Paul Marco Remembers Ed Wood Jr." (1987)

Friends 'til the end: Paul Marco (right) and Ed Wood.

Something wonderful has been happening recently in the online Ed Wood fan community. A gentleman named Jason Insalaco has been sharing some rarely-seen photographs of his great-uncle, eccentric character actor Paul Marco (1927-2006), to an Ed Wood discussion group on Facebook. We all remember Paul as the bumbling, cowardly Officer Kelton in three of Eddie's best-known films: Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). Kelton reminds me of those wacky comic relief sidekicks they'd put into every action-adventure cartoon I watched as a kid. He's the Ed Wood equivalent of Snarf on Thundercats, Gleek on Superfriends, or Orko on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

But we should remember that there's more to Paul Marco than just being Officer Kelton. In addition to having a life and career all his own, he was a key member of Ed Wood's personal and professional circle for many years. In Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Paul is portrayed by Doogie Howser star Max Casella as an eager but not-too-bright young man who will blindly follow Eddie (Johnny Depp) wherever he chooses to go, even if it's straight off a cliff. While this makes for some amusing scenes, it hardly gives us a complete picture of who Paul Marco was. The reality was more nuanced and complex than that.

Paul on Donna Reed.

This week, in the interest of learning more about the man, I will return to Filmfax #6 from March/April 1987. As part of its extensive coverage of Ed Wood, it includes a piece called "Paul Marco Remembers Ed Wood Jr." by prolific pop culture author Jan Alan Henderson. As the title indicates, it's an extended interview with Paul himself, who at that time was still working in Hollywood but was always eager to share his remembrances of Eddie. I've heard accounts that Paul became increasingly paranoid and delusional in his later years as his mental faculties declined, but he's clear and coherent in this interview.

Since Paul Marco's IMDb page is somewhat vague and incomplete, this article helpfully fills in some missing details about his decades-long Hollywood career. You may think that Paul only ever appeared in those three movies, but he did land some acting roles outside of the Woodiverse. I've spotted him in episodes of The Donna Reed Show ("Donna Decorates," 1960) and 77 Sunset Strip ("Trouble in the Middle East," 1960). This article gives us a couple more of Paul's TV credits (G.E. Theater and Ramar of the Jungle) and tells us he was also a stage actor and guest lecturer. Henderson further highlights an under-reported aspect of Paul's career: being a propman on TV shows like Family Ties and Webster as well as the Joe Dante sci-fi movie Explorers (1985).

One of the problems that screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski faced when writing the script for Ed Wood is that they didn't know how Eddie met any of the people in his inner circle, including Paul. In their fictionalized version of the story, Paul was simply one of the actors in Ed Wood's short-lived stage production The Casual Company. But that's not really how it happened. Paul Marco was not involved in The Casual Company whatsoever. In this interview, the actor tells how he and Ed really met:

"My publicist called me up and said, 'Paul, I want to tell you about someone.' I said, 'Oh, really,' and she said, 'Yes, he's a producer , director, writer, he's a genius.' That interested me very much, because I wrote, produced, directed and did all those things myself, or tried to, and we were around the same age, so I wanted to meet him. And Ed was everything that my publicist said--charming, witty, talented, very effervescent, smiling and a lot of fun to be with. He was way ahead of his time."

Paul with Marg Usher.

I don't know who Paul's publicist was at that time, but I know he had an agent named Marg Usher (1913-1989). She's actually credited as a producer on Night of the Ghouls, and if you look at old newspaper clippings about Paul, her name sometimes comes up alongside his. An article in the November 5, 1954 edition of The Los Angeles Citizen News, for instance, reports that Ms. Usher signed a two-picture deal with Ed Wood on behalf of three clients: Paul Marco, Tony McCoy, and Dolores Fuller. All three actors, according to the article, would appear in Wood's upcoming film Bride of the Atom. In her own autobiography, A Fuller Life (2009), Dolores Fuller reports that Usher represented Loretta King, not Dolores, and was responsible for Loretta getting the lead role in Bride.

In his Filmfax interview, Paul Marco explains that he took Bride of the Atom to Marg Usher after meeting with Ed Wood. Marg met with Ed herself, and it went quite well. So well, in fact, that Ms. Usher was recruited to raise money for Bride. Marco confirms that Tony McCoy was one of Usher's clients as well. The actor says that Ed Wood rewrote the character of "an Irish desk sergeant" in the film to better suit Marco's "fun, excitable" personality and that it was Marg's idea to name the character Kelton in honor of Kelton Avenue, the West Los Angeles street where she lived.

Paul Marco uses this interview to dispel some rumors about Ed's directorial style, including the idea that he directed while in drag and that he spoke through a megaphone like directors did in the silent movie days. Keep in mind, both of these urban legends wound up in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Paul claims that Bela Lugosi was looking directly at him while delivering his iconic "I have no home" monologue, the one he delivers to George Becwar in Bride of the Monster. Jan Henderson adds that Becwar was younger than his character, Professor Strowski, but was made-up to look older. 

As Paul tells it, he was Ed Wood's "right-hand man in the corporation," helping him raise capital for future projects involving Bela Lugosi. Unfortunately, as we all know, Lugosi died in August 1956, before another film could be completed. Eddie's next feature, Plan 9 from Outer Space, was famously built around some unused footage Ed had of Lugosi, shot very near the end of the actor's life. In the Filmfax article, Paul Marco confirms that some of this footage was intended for The Vampire's Tomb (which he calls Tomb of the Vampire). But Eddie was simultaneously working on a TV mystery series starring Bela. So it's very possible that the Plan 9 footage is drawn from two different unfinished Lugosi projects. Maybe that's why he's dressed as Dracula in some scenes but is a grieving widow in others.

Bride, Plan 9, and Ghouls are sometimes called "the Kelton trilogy" because they all feature the same comedic side character, but Paul maintained that Eddie had other plans for the luckless policeman. Marco was to play Sheriff Kelton in the unrealized horror-Western The Ghoul Goes West and would have reprised the character in an untitled film with Kenne Duncan and Aldo Ray as well. Marco also alludes to another unrealized Wood project called The Night of Black and White Ghosts, the footage from which wound up in Night of the Ghouls. Another fascinating tidbit from this article is that Paul was the connection between Ed Wood and Vampira, since they were "running around" together at that time. ("We had dates," he says.) According to Paul, Eddie and Vampira met at the premiere of Bride of the Atom. 

It's sometimes difficult to discern how all the players in the Ed Wood saga knew each other or how they entered the fray, so explanatory articles like this one are a godsend. Here, we learn that Paul brought in several of Plan 9's most memorable actors. John "Bunny" Breckinridge, who played the fey alien ruler in that film, was Paul's houseguest. And David De Mering, who played the wisecracking pilot Danny, was Bunny's secretary back then.

Henderson presses Paul for details about the financing of Plan 9, and we get the usual anecdotes about the Beverly Hills Baptists and Tor Johnson being baptized in a swimming pool. This is all recreated in Ed Wood and has been rehashed in numerous documentaries. The part of the story we rarely hear is that Paul himself was originally the film's executive producer but got nudged aside when the Baptists took over. Paul's main gripe is that he was denied special billing ("And Paul Marco as Kelton the Cop") in the final film. It's clear that Eddie and Paul had a falling-out during the making of Plan 9 but eventually rekindled their friendship. Paul also reveals that he recruited yet another key cast member, Criswell, whom he met through his publicist. Jason Insalaco's pictures show that Paul and Cris remained friends for years, long after the making of Plan 9.

Paul Marco contends that he didn't act in Ed Wood's later movies because he wasn't interested in appearing in "porno pictures," not even the relatively benign The Sinister Urge (1960), which contains only a few seconds of nudity. The actor also vetoed an appearance in the more explicit Orgy of the Dead (1965) and was surprised that Criswell agreed to be in it. But Paul was amenable to appearing in Night of the Ghouls, which was conceived as a direct sequel to Bride of the Monster. While that film was largely unseen until its release on VHS in the 1980s, Paul says it was previewed in Hollywood when it was new, playing on the same bill as William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) and even garnering good notices.

One interesting topic that arises during Paul Marco's conversation with Jan Henderson is the bootleg Plan 9 from Outer Space soundtrack album that was released by Pendulum Records in the early 1980s (catalog number EROS-009) and had liner notes supposedly written by Ed Wood himself. I've long heard that those liner notes are totally bogus, something Paul confirms in this article. "None of that is true," he contends, while acknowledging that Peter Coe (who was housing Ed and Kathy Wood at the time of Ed's death in December 1978) really was a football fan.

The happy (?) couple.

The topic of conversation then turns to Ed Wood's brief marriage to Norma McCarty. Both Henderson and Marco are under the (mistaken) impression that Eddie had married Dolores Fuller, so they refer to his wedding to Norma as his "second." According to Paul, the doomed Wood-McCarty nuptials were held at a large soundstage on Sunset Blvd. Bela Lugosi was in attendance, as the photographs of the event will attest. Paul himself threw together the reception in a hurry, assisted by his friend, actress Cheerio Meredith (1890-1964), best known from The Andy Griffith Show. (The article misspells her name as Cherry O'Meredith.)

As happy as the wedding was, complete with an improbably huge pink cake, the marriage itself fizzled quickly. Eddie ended up moving in with Paul for a time, though Paul describes him as a "houseguest" rather than a "roommate." The highlight of this era was a lavish Christmas party where Bela Lugosi was the guest of honor. Paul and Eddie even had an all-black Christmas tree just for Bela and invited columnists from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. At that time, Paul reports, Eddie was dating a "beautiful blonde" named Kathy whom he eventually married and moved in with. After Night of the Ghouls, Paul never again appeared in one of Eddie's movies, though the two remained friends through the '60s and '70s.

The article ends with Paul sadly relaying the details of Ed Wood's memorial service and wake. This, too, is mostly familiar material to longtime fans. Peter Coe made most of the arrangements, but Paul assisted in planning the memorial because "Kathy was in no shape to do it." The one detail that stuck out to me was that, according to Paul, Eddie's ashes went missing and were never located. That contradicts what I'd always heard, which is that Kathy scattered the ashes in the Pacific Ocean. Who knows? Ed Wood's ashes may still be out there somewhere, filed in some forgotten drawer.

Even though most Wood fans have deeply mixed feelings about Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), we must ultimately be grateful to this book because it stirred up interest in Eddie's films that might have otherwise dissipated. Because of the Medveds, journalists took the time to track down Ed's surviving friends and coworkers and interview them. And it led to articles like "Paul Marco Remembers Ed Wood Jr."

And believe it or not, I'm still not done with Filmfax #6. There's one more thing in that magazine I'd like to talk about, but it will have to wait for another time. I hope you will join me then.