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| A young beauty meets a watery end in "Gemeni." |
Ed Wood has some of the best fans in the world. The man was either ignored or ridiculed during his own lifetime, but I think he'd be heartened to learn how his devotees have preserved his legacy in the decades following his death. They've saved as many of his films, books, and articles as possible, and they're always searching through the archives for more, keeping me supplied with things to review for this blog.
Recently, a Wood fan named Jamie Teel posted a few pages from a 1993 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine to an Ed Wood forum on Facebook. These pages included not only an article about Ed Wood by Mark Carducci, director of Flying Saucers Over Hollywood (1992), but also a previously unpublished short story by Eddie himself. I think I'll cover the Carducci article in the future, but I had to offer up my thoughts on the short story while it was still fresh in my brain.
The story: "Gemeni," originally published in Famous Monsters of Filmland #201, Fall 1993.
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| Some vintage '70s astrology art. |
Synopsis: Our narrator, a struggling filmmaker, tells us about his tragic relationship with a woman he nicknamed "Gemeni," referring to both her birth sign and her duplicitous nature. He was deeply in love with the faithless, flirtatious "Gemeni" and even planned to marry her after her divorce was final. Unfortunately, she was only after a man with money, and he was flat broke at the time. Desperate to keep her, he promised he would receive some money from investors soon. She coldly told him to get in touch with her when he had the cash in hand.
After his breakup with "Gemeni," the narrator went through a drinking binge but then decided to raise as much money as he possibly could from potential backers. Driven by spite, he became a successful filmmaker, with his company making both movies and television shows. Newly wealthy, he contacted "Gemeni" again. This time, she agreed to marry him. After three "wonderful" weeks of matrimony, however, she announced her plans to divorce him and take half of everything he owned.
Hatching a plan, our narrator convinced "Gemeni" to travel to Europe with him aboard a cruise ship. She agreed and bought an expensive wardrobe for the trip. Once onboard the ship, she returned to her old ways of flirting with wealthy men and blatantly ignoring her husband. Two nights into the trip, the insanely jealous narrator almost strangled "Gemeni" to death but eventually decided to tie her up with underwear and throw her out a porthole with weights attached to her ankles. She sank into the ocean, dead. But even then, "Gemeni" wasn't quite done with him.
Wood trademarks: Husband murdering his wife (cf. "Scream Your Bloody Head Off"); nighties and negligees (cf. Glen or Glenda, many of Ed's other stories); drinking binge; satin and silk; movie business (Westerns and horror, both genres Ed attempted); money problems; angora sweater (worn by the title character).
Excerpt: "I got drunk. Two days of it. Two days it lasted. Then the courage of vengance entered my every thought. I would wrap her in my vengance. I would make more money in a shorter time than she had ever seen in her whole life and when I had that money, sure I'd call her. I'd call her and I would laugh right in her face. I would laugh. How I would laugh."
Reflections: Edgar Allan Poe must have had some kind of influence on Ed Wood. I mean, Eddie rewrote Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) as "The Rue Morgue Revisited" (1971), hewing very closely to Poe's original plot and dialogue. As a student of all things Gothic and spooky, Ed must have spent some time poring over the stories of Poe, perhaps even when he was still in school back in Poughkeepsie. Above all, Poe's eroticization of death must have intrigued Ed, since that's a common feature of many of Ed's own films, stories, and novels.
"Gemeni" strikes me as Ed Wood's attempt at a Poe-type story. Not that he attempts to copy Poe's florid writing style, but he seems to be evoking the same mood of haunted, doomed romanticism. The narrator mourns and moons over "Gemeni" as if she were the lost Lenore. He even cries while he murders her, missing her already! The fact that Ed's story is written in the first person makes it similar to Poe's most famous tales, including "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), which is also the confession of a revenge-murderer.
As for the exact provenance of this story, that's difficult to determine. "Gemeni" carries a modest introduction from Famous Monsters editor and founder Forrest J. Ackerman, who very briefly (and ineffectively) served as Ed Wood's literary agent in the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s, Ed Wood had all the writing work he could handle and no longer needed Ackerman's dubious assistance. "Gemeni" seems to have been a story that Ed submitted to Famous Monsters that Ackerman decided not to publish for a variety of reasons: not scary enough, too mature for young readers, etc. And yet, miraculously, Uncle Forry held onto the unused manuscript for decades! We're too lucky.
For me, the greatest aspect of "Gemeni" was that the unnamed narrator was an obvious stand-in for the story's own author. As Ed Wood (1994) demonstrates so amusingly, Eddie spent a lot of his time trying to raise money for various projects, usually without success. By securing funds from his backers, the narrator of "Gemeni" gets to live the kind of life that Eddie would have wanted to live. As he writes:
I made that money. During the next three weeks I borrowed and begged enough through my friends around the industry to open four motion Picture and Television producing companies. One week later the pictures I wanted to make were financed. At the end of the next week the original company was re-financed. The westerns made by that company became an overnight sensation. Two horror features turned out to be money grossing sleepers and a new television series of pictures were accepted by the public with great enthusiasm. In fact, on the television deal I made a five year contract on the series. Five more weeks and my bank account had reached the seven figure mark and steadily growing.
Only in fiction, Eddie. Only in fiction.